As cyber crime swells into a $1.5tn a year business, law enforcement struggles to keep pace. So too film-makers, still wrestling with a nagging question: how to make cyber crime sexy? And so we get the fitfully entertaining Silk Road, a wannabe dark-web noir based on real events. It pits an old-school cop against a libertarian millennial web pirate fixated on changing the world one click at a time and becoming a bitcoin billionaire in the process.
“I’m a door-kicker,” growls Rick Bowden (Jason Clarke), a redeployed DEA dinosaur who will be disappointed when he finds out what RAM is. His Plan A is to hit the streets and bash heads together, which is like bringing a knife to a cyber-fight. Clearly this is no underworld for old men but at least Rick is willing to learn a new skill. Soon our “Jurassic Narc” is frowning over “introduction to the internet” videos. Meanwhile his adversary Ross (Nick Robinson, in regulation hoodie and bum-fluff beard) is building a drug-dealing empire armed only with a laptop and fleet fingers. Yes, the characterisation is as binary as that — and writer/director Tiller Russell wants us to know that he knows it.
“You’re a walking cliché!” Rick is told by his irritatingly young boss. Meanwhile, Ross’s increasingly alarmed girlfriend implores: “This isn’t a movie!” — the sort of thing people say only in movies. But such meta moments are an insufficient firewall against the general air of overfamiliarity: drawing attention to a cliché doesn’t stop it being one.
Still, the game of cat-and-mouse is diverting enough, tension simmering as things get real IRL and the net closes in around Ross. There is even some blurring of moral boundaries as cracks start to appear in Rick’s Old Fashioned Values. What doesn’t help is that both men are saddled with tired and thinly drawn backstories: a failing marriage and fragile daughter for Rick; an impossible-to-please daddy for Ross.
All of this is designed to distract from the central problem: the innate tedium of watching people stare blankly into computers, even when lives or large sums are at stake. In that respect, Silk Road is no game-changer. For film-makers, the vexing irony remains: crimes committed on screens just don’t make for scintillating screen entertainment.
★★★☆☆
On digital platforms from March 22
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