Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Tiller Russell
Starring: Nick Robinson, Jason Clarke, Alexandra
Shipp, Katie Aselton, Jimmi Simpson, Paul Walter Hauser
Operating between 2011 and 2013, 'Silk Road' was an online marketplace
for illegal goods, predominantly drugs, with over 100,000 estimated
customers over its short lifespan. As its opening disclaimer informs us,
director Tiller Russell's Silk Road is a heavily
dramatised recap of the events around the site's founding and eventual
arrest of its founder, Ross Ulbrecht.
Ulbrecht (Nick Robinson) is portrayed as a cocky kid with an
anti-authoritarian streak. Having failed at various career ventures, he
stumbles upon the brainwave of an "Amazon for drugs" where buyers can
anonymously make purchases using bitcoin. Thanks to publicity from the
website Gawker, the site, which he christens 'Silk Road', becomes a
phenomenon.
Of course, this quickly attracts the attention of the DEA and FBI. In
reality, a pair of DEA agents were found to have been exploiting their
investigation of Ulbrecht for their own personal gain. In Russell's
version of events, these two figures are combined into the burly persona
of disgraced narc turned desk jockey Rick Bowden (Jason Clarke).
After botching an undercover sting and spending time in rehab with
addiction issues, the veteran Bowden is relocated to the cyber crimes
unit, where his 26-year-old boss (Will Ropp) shuts him into a
corner office, hoping he'll twiddle his thumbs and keep out of his hair.
Despite being a complete luddite, Bowden stumbles across Silk Road, and
with the aid of a streetwise informant (Darrell Britt-Gibson),
sets up a fake online persona to take down Ulbrecht.
Silk Road suffers from two glaring issues. Firstly,
thrillers involving online crime are rarely exciting. No matter how much
you gussy it up, there's nothing thrilling about watching someone
writing code or characters sending text messages back and forth.
Ulbrecht is a particularly uninteresting antagonist, spending most of
his time hunched over a laptop. Despite the money rolling into his bank
account, he never seems to be enjoying the fruits of his labour and we
never see how his life has improved through his business venture. The
movie opens with a flash-forward to Ulbrecht's arrest, and the presence
of an armed SWAT unit is laughable given how unthreatening a presence
Ulbrecht is.
Then there's the problem of whom we're supposed to root for here. It's
impossible to empathise with either Ulbrecht or Bowden, and so the film
finds itself caught between two stools. No mainstream American movie is
going to posit what is essentially a drug dealer as its hero or even
anti-hero, but at the same time the days of an audience blindly taking
the side of a law enforcement figure have long since passed. With two
leads that we can't invest in, we're left to simply watch the story
unspool with little in the way of emotional engagement.
Russell clearly wants to deliver a film that's part
Goodfellas, part The Social Network, but it lacks the edgy energy of the former and the Sorkinese patter
of the latter. The real life Ulbrecht is clearly a highly intelligent
individual, but Russell's bland script makes him seem like a dumb jock
who just stumbled across the internet. Robinson's Ulbrecht speaks in
reductive soundbites, and his conscience is reflected awkwardly in his
interactions with his disapproving girlfriend (Alexandra Shipp).
Similarly, Bowden's wife (Katie Aselton) functions as a moral
scold, the classic cliché of the wife forcing her career-driven husband
to choose between his job and his family.
As dumbed-down as the narrative is here, I still found myself
scratching my head regarding the logistics of Ulbrecht's operation. If,
like me, you're unfamiliar with the workings of this sort of venture,
you'll find yourself hitting Google as soon as the credits roll to fill
in the blanks.
