REVIEW: SILK ROAD (2021)
Tiller Russell’s Silk Road tells the true story of how Ross Ulbricht (Nick Robinson) created an online marketplace, akin to Amazon and eBay, that sold illegal drugs and weapons. While Ulbricht’s story makes for a great cinematic exploration on how the ever-growing space of the online economy has created a sub-space of illicit marketplaces, it, unfortunately, takes second fiddle as the audience is forced to [mostly] follow a washed-up DEA Agent (Jason Clarke) who decides to track down Ulbricht (or the DreadPirateRoberts) on his own, distancing himself from his family further than the case that ruined his career. All of this sounds incredibly familiar and, because of this, Silk Road lacks any form of originality and/or interest.
The film makes its biggest mistake right from the get-go by introducing the audience to Rick Bowden (Clarke) instead of Ulbricht. The film would’ve immediately been interesting if it decided to make a quasi rags-to-riches-to-downfall story, à la The Wolf of Wall Street, on how Ulbricht created the biggest illegal online marketplace in the history of the Dark Web. Instead, writer/director Tiller Russell paints Ulbricht as an insecure entrepreneur, with his arc forever going in circles. His website begins to skyrocket, making him more distant from his girlfriend (Alexandra Shipp) and personal life. Once he becomes “distant,” this is the only thing Nick Robinson will do throughout the film. There’s no fascinating access to Ulbricht’s psychology. The audience only has access to “seeds” of his libertarian political views and overall opinions on how the government controls Internet activity, but barely anything concrete for us to fully get invested in the story and Ulbricht’s journey from zero to Dark Web “hero”.
Instead, the film needlessly focuses on Rick Bowden’s clichéd arc as a washed-up officer, with an old job gone wrong (that the audience is unaware of ) ruining his career and creating a rift in his relationship with his wife and daughter. Jason Clarke does the best he can by trying not to paint Bowden full of clichés but doesn’t succeed. We’ve all seen it before: he may look and sound like a totally selfish jerk who has many personal and psychological troubles but will “sacrifice” himself at the end of the movie to do right by his family. We have no idea if Bowden is a real character since the film’s opening text reads, “This story is true. Except for what we made up or changed.”, so his being in the movie feels rather pointless.
There are interesting aspects of the movie, all involving the creation of the Silk Road marketplace: how Ulbricht came with the idea, how bitcoin made every transaction virtually untraceable or a side-character who became Ulbricht’s business partner (Paul Walter Hauser). One of the few genuinely good scenes involving Bowden is when he starts to chat with Ulbricht and goes to Utah to “kill” his partner. Paul Walter Hauser continues to prove how talented of an actor he is, and shares terrific chemistry with Clarke’s character. When Bowden shows up in San Francisco to confront Ulbricht, it feels incredibly surreal and, dare I say, “distant”, compared to the scene with Hauser, because Robinson and Clarke aren’t acting with each other. There’s no chemistry done by both actors who feel like they are playing in two different movies. The end result is a terribly under-cooked film, brimming with potential.
All of the interesting aspects of Silk Road are overshadowed by a boring, paint-by-numbers story of a “washed-up cop” finally getting his “shot” at redemption. This isn’t why audiences are watching the movie–they want to see how Silk Road was created and how Ross Ulbricht’s obsession with “freeing America” as a libertarian made him one of the most successful drug kingpins that ever lived, even if his “reign” was short-lived. None of that is presented in the movie; we’d rather want to watch a cop doing right by his family, instead of exploring the confines of the dark web and the twisted psychology of Silk Road‘s instigator. A hugely disappointing film, but not an outright terrible one. Oh well.
