Philosophical twenty-something Ross Ulbricht creates Silk Road, a dark net website that sells narcotics, while DEA agent Rick Bowden goes undercover to bring him down.
We begin with a soft warning, “this story is true except for the things we changed”, and I chuckled.
We kick off with a scene with Ross Ulbricht (Nick Robinson) inside a coffee shop, where a bunch of undercover cops are ready to bust him. As he sits there, he gets a call, and boom, flashback to three years prior. Next, we follow Ross, who is now building this ‘Silk Road,’ an online drug superstore that he has made untraceable.
While Ross begins to set the world on fire with his new site, he has caught the FBI’s attention. Although the FBI is trying to take down Ross strategically, DEA Agent Rick Bowden (Jason Clarke) has had enough, and he wants to shut down this operation by any means necessary.
An un-hinged Jason Clarke in a movie is something I can get behind in every film. He is the perfect addition to every movie he is in, and his intensity behind this role was magnificent. Clarke made you feel Bowden’s frustration and anger, and he killed it in this movie.
Speaking of acting, Nick Robinson, I finished A Teacher, which he starred in and was fantastic in it, was great in this as well. The importance of a kid who goes from nothing to something, and how arrogant he got, Robinson hit the role on the head.
Finally, as we reach the end of the movie, it was slightly predictable, mostly since it is loosely based on the true story, but that was just fine. Tiller Russell wrote and directed a The Big Short meets Wolf of Wall Street version of Ross Ulbricht’s Silk Road.
