DEAL OR NO DEAL?
DARK WEB DRUG DRAMA STARTS STRONG, BUT FAILS TO KEEP UP THE TENSION AS A CAT-AND-MOUSE CHASE HEATS UP
BILLED as a “product of journalistic research and wild flights of fiction”, Silk Road dramatises the hunt for an authority-flouting entrepreneur, who established an illegal underground marketplace dubbed Amazon for drugs.
David Kushner’s 2014 magazine article Dead End On Silk Road: Internet Crime Kingpin Ross Ulbricht’s Big Fall gives writerdirector Tiller Russell plentiful food for thought as he zig-zags between the twentysomething target, who claims to be using “the internet as an instrument of liberty”, and a morally flawed DEA agent on his trail.
This game of cat and mouse in the digital space has the makings of a gripping thriller and the opening scene of Silk Road – a covert operation to take down Ulbricht and seize his laptop – establishes a nerve-jangling, brisk pace.
Unfortunately, those initial droplets of tension evaporate as Russell struggles to chart a clear path through the twists and turns in the case, dividing time between hunter and naive prey.
Love, Simon star Nick Robinson fails to scratch beneath the surface of “the first millennial gangster” who impulsively orders a hit to cover his tracks, unaware that the shadowy facilitator is a cunning law enforcer.
Jason Clarke suffers a similar fate as Rick Bowden, the old school DEA agent with compromised integrity, who is reassigned to the bright young things of cyber crime when he barely understands email or the internet.
Following a visit to one of his informants (Darrell Britt-gibson), Bowden begins gathering evidence on Silk Road, which is generating $1.2m a day through the
anonymous sale of narcotics.
Site owner Ross Ulbricht (Robinson) ignores the warnings of girlfriend Julia (Alexandra Shipp) and best friend Max (Daniel David Stewart) to obsessively expand his empire with the help of a trusted vendor (Paul Walter Hauser).
Alas, Ross makes a series of fatal missteps in pursuit of idealism and he predicts his own downfall.
Meanwhile, agent Bowden neglects his wife (Katie Aselton) and daughter (Lexi Rabe) to hunt Ross and prove justice operates most effectively on the ground, not in front of a computer screen.
Silk Road distils Bowden’s involvement in Ulbricht’s downfall to a pedestrian plod starved of nail-biting thrills.
Russell’s script offers scant insight to the complex psyches of either man and provides few signposts to guide the uninitiated through the murky world of the dark web and cryptocurrency.
Clarke and Robinson look suitably haunted as their adversaries fall victim to paranoia and hubris and pay excessively for their crimes.
■ Streaming on all major platforms from Monday