The Silk Road is a thriller film directed by Tiller Russell. The film serves to tell the real-life story of Ross Ulbricht (Nick Robinson), the founder of Silk Road: a website that functioned as Amazon for hardcore drugs.
I have been excited for this film for a while,
, there is a lot of interesting things about it, little details and such, and I was eagerly waiting to see how this film would show the story. Sadly, it chose to be generic and just like every other drug kingpin take down film out there. To say the films take on events lacked nuance would be a vast, vast understatement- it is morally simplistic.
The main thing I will give this film prompts for is finally giving me a Jason Clarke performance that I enjoyed. Clarke excels as the shady, but ‘doing it for the right reasons’ DEA agent tasked with bringing Ulbricht down, and his performance is easily the best thing about the film, Robinson was great in The Kings Of Summer and Love, Simon but was deeply milk toast here.
The ending also felt quite anticlimactic, they were building it up and building it up and then when it finally gave us an ending it was underwhelming, and I was left going ‘is that it’? I understand that is based on a true story so they are limited with what they can do with it, but in a writing and set up capacity there were issues with building and execution that really hampered the ending.
Overall, sadly, yet another generic crime film.
Pros.
Clarke
A few interesting moments
Cons.
The ending
Simplifying the issue
Robinson
2/5
Reviewed by Luke
Another Millennial Reviewer 