Atripto thedark side
Cert 15
SILK ROAD
★★★
On digital from tomorrow
Billed as a “product of journalistic research and wild flights of fiction”, this diverting crime-thriller charts the rise and fall of a modern-day drug lord.
Ross Ulbricht (Nick Robinson) is the young man behind Silk Road, the dark web marketplace the FBI calls the “the Amazon of drug sites”.
Based on a Rolling Stone article (that’s the “journalistic” bit), the film divides its time between the 26-year-old entrepreneur and Rick Bowden ( Jason Clarke), a drug enforcement agent determined to hunt him down.
Bowden comes across as a collection of cop drama cliches (“wild flights” indeed). After being reassigned to cyber crime (via rehab) to serve out his last months before early retirement, the dinosaur defies his tech-savvy millennial bosses by using his oldfashioned style of policing to put a face to the online drugs lord known only to his clients as the Dread Pirate Roberts ( from The Princess Bride).
Still, if, like me, you’re a fan of films about old-school maverick cops in search of redemption, you should enjoy Bowden’s attempts to stick it to the millennials.
Less successful are attempts to make us root for the flip flop-wearing multi-millionaire.
Director Tiller Russell sees Ulbricht as a misguided idealist who got in over his head but his speeches about free trade ring hollow.
This old-school film reviewer would have liked more details of how he pulled it off, too. His rise seems to involve little more than tapping on a laptop and discovering Bitcoin. But I suppose encryption and typing were never going to be as exciting as speakeasies and shootouts.
Organised crime just isn’t what it used to be.
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This thriller charts the rise and fall of a modern-day drug lord