“Silk Road” is a thriller crime/drama based on the true story behind the rise and fall of the Internet’s first unregulated marketplace platform, Silk Road, which was used for selling illegal drugs online. The film stars Nick Robinson as founder of the platform, Ross Ulbricht, and shows how Ulbricht develops it into a multimillion-dollar pipeline for illicit drugs and how he’s eventually taken down. The film is written and directed by Tiller Russell and was inspired by the article “Dead End on Silk Road: Internet Crime Kingpin Ross Ulbricht’s Big Fall” by David Kushner.
The film begins where Ulbricht is about to get caught, immediately throwing the audience into the story. He’s paranoid, looks tired, and his every move is being watched without him realizing it. It isn’t until he finally finds a place to sit down and open his laptop, unknowingly being watched by DEA agents ready to arrest him, that he receives an unexpected and mysterious call. Before we can hear who is on the other end, the audience is sent back in time to the beginning of the actual story where we will eventually learn how he got to that unfortunate position and mysterious call. You’re immediately brought into the film and find interest in knowing what happened, but the interest doesn’t really last long as the film continues.
We meet Ulbricht—more cleaned up than he was when we first saw him in the film— who is super intelligent with strong political opinions, and soon gets an idea for an online platform. He teaches himself how to master code and creates the entire thing himself, creating a website similar to Amazon but for drugs.
We’re also introduced to our antagonist of the film, Rick Bowden, portrayed by Jason Clarke, who is an unpredictable and dirty DEA agent with issues at home and at work. Bowden discovers the site once Ulbricht launches it and becomes obsessed with trying to find out who Ulbricht really is, which causes more issues both in his personal life and at work. The film doesn’t really let the audience emotionally connect with the side characters much, often pulling away prematurely from the scene before we could even try. Throughout the film the main characters go back and forth in a sort of cat-and-mouse game as tensions rise with several relationships on both ends and with one another.
Darrell Britt-Gibson and Jason Clarke in Silk Road. Photo Credit: Catherine Kanavy.
Though Robinson and Clarke perform great in their roles, it’s the cheesy music during intended-tense scenes, the directing, lack of character depth, and the ancillary cast that deteriorated my interest and became too distracting. For example, the character Shields played by Will Ropp, who was supposed to be a more superior role to Bowden, was difficult to take seriously due to how young Ropp looked with a what seemed forced mustache to make him look older. I’m not sure if it was on purpose or not, but it was really distracting, and it made me view the DEA agents as a joke.
I also felt that the narration was better than the actual dialogue coming from the characters within a scene. It wasn’t until the last 20 minutes of the film where my interest picked up again, which brings us back to the beginning of the film where we left off, showing us how he’s ultimately caught and what he’s told during his mysterious phone call which gave a bit of satisfaction for the wait.
Overall, I believe the film had good potential and provided insight on a story I wasn’t aware of. Robinson and Clarke give great performances, though Robinson has never really disappointed me in anything he does really and was the reason why I chose to watch the film in the first place. At the end of the day, there are just too many elements within the film that made me lose interest or were too distracting to keep me invested in the characters and the story being told.
*You can watch “Silk Road” via streaming on YouTube, Google Play, Vudu, and Amazon Prime.
