Silk Road (2021) | Film Review

If you have never heard the story of Silk Road, the infamous shopping site on the dark web which essentially became Amazon for illegal contraband, then you’ve been missing out. True crime and historians alike have been eating up the life story of Ross Ulbricht for several years now, whose Libertarian principles guided him into designing and lording over this digital marketplace for decadence. It is a story almost too insane to be a reality, yet it is very true, and now writer-director Tiller Russell (Netflix’s The Night Stalker docuseries) finally brings the sordid tale to the screen.

Ross Ulbricht (Nick Robinson) kicks Silk Road off as a cocky Libertarian who espouses free will and abhors Government regulation with his girlfriend Lisa (Alexandra Shipp, frustratingly underutilized) and his best friend. The world should be loose and carefree; if you want to smoke crack or munch down a few mushrooms you should have the right, that’s Ross’s world view. So he creates Silk Road, an underground digital marketplace where users can ship drugs and other illegal items through everyday postal services, and one which navigates on a virtually untraceable currency: bitcoin (which demonstrates how forward thinking Ross actually was if you’ve been paying attention to recent events).

Elsewhere, disgraced DEA Agent, Rick Bowden (Jason Clarke), has been relegated to desk duty in Cyber Crimes due to his recent actions which threatened an undercover operation, and continues to put unnecessary stress on his marriage. Despite being told he’s only there to wait out his time until he can retire with a full pension, Rick enlists the help of Rayford (hysterically portrayed by Darrell Britt-Gibson) – a former informant of Rick’s with quite an astute amount of IT knowledge – to track down the ringleader of this burgeoning business known as Silk Road.

Tiller Russell’s version of events moves at an expedited clip to get us into the meatier aspects of Silk Road: the emerging empire of Ross’s, which essentially amounts to the first digital drug Kingpin. The difficulty of watching a film based on a case you know all-too-well, is recognizing when Russell is taking shortcuts or altering the path of story for a more entertaining film. Though most of the film does actually occur, more or less, this is a rare occasion where the film would have benefitted from a longer run time, or even a limited series to truly fluff out the details.

Rick Bowden finds himself desperate to prove that he is more than an old dog fit to be put down, and though Bowden’s methods and Jason Clarke’s performance do get a bit overwrought in a few spots, it’s difficult to not root for the down-and-dirty agent to succeed. When his own superiors – including the slick-witted FBI Agent in charge, Chris Tarbell (Jimmi Simpson, reigning King of the slick wit) – discount Rick merely due to his boots-on-the-ground approach, we easily find ourselves hopeful this dinosaur tunnels his way out of obscurity and into Ross’s conviction, primarily due to the intensity and desperation of Clarke’s performance.

Ross Ulbricht is a brilliant self-taught developer who created an underground highway used for the purposes of moving drugs, weapons, fake IDs, you name it. The FBI painted him as a Silicon Valley Scarface, while those closest to him painted him as a well-intentioned idealist. The truth likely lies somewhere in the middle. Nick Robinson handles the rather daunting challenge of portraying Ross well, despite being written as overly empathetic for a person who committed some very heinous crimes.

I mean, we are talking about a character who potentially sanctions a murder, and Russell’s script paints such a horrific idea as the culmination of too much stress and a bad breakup. It’s almost made light of rather than a showcase for how far away from idealism Ross has inevitably fallen. These aren’t Robinson’s problem obviously, as he is simply working off the page, but it does detract from fully embracing the character on screen when the writing is handing him an “excuse” for truly despicable deeds.

Regardless of diluting the true history more than I’d prefer, as a film on its own merits, Silk Road is an energetic thriller which functions as the stories of two men of polar opposite life trajectories whose paths will inevitably collide. The technical aspects of Silk Road are explained rather plainly to ensure even your computer-scolding grandfather can follow the story beats, and instead of techy jargon, Russell focuses on the cat-and-mouse tension as our aging cop hunts down a wonderkid, with a few intriguing turn-of-events for those unfamiliar with the lore.

Silk Road is not the immersive detail on everything that spawned from the actions of Ross Ulbricht’s fascinating endeavor, and it presents its primary character in too bright a light, but it remains a fairly riveting account on one of the greatest crimes of this century nonetheless.

Follow our further discussion on Silk Road via this episode of The Hollywood Outsider podcast: