SILK ROAD (15)

AVAILABLE MARCH 22 ON DEMAND FROM ALL MAJOR PLATFORMS

Playfully 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 writer-director 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.

Love, Simon star Nick Robinson is “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 is the old school DEA agent with compromised integrity, who is reassigned to the bright young things of cyber crime when he barely understands the basics of 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 1.2 million US dollars a day through the anonymous sale of narcotics. Site owner Ross Ulbricht (Robinson) ignores the dire warnings of girlfriend Julia (Alexandra Shipp) and best friend Max (Daniel David Stewart) to obsessively expand his empire with the help of one of his most trusted vendors (Paul Walter Hauser).

Meanwhile, agent Bowden neglects his wife Sandy (Katie Aselton) and young daughter (Lexi Rabe) to doggedly hunt Ross and prove that justice operates most effectively on the ground, not in front of a computer screen. Clarke and Robinson look suitably haunted as their adversaries fall victim to paranoia and hubris and pay excessively for their crimes.