Silk Road: Mercado Clandestino

I had never heard of Silk Road until this movie came out. I read up on the actual events and it looks like they left out a bunch of the story. Evidently Ross Ulbricht put out hits on at least six more people. Not to mention, a second agent was arrested, Shaun Bridges, who worked on the same task force and ran an even more lucrative scheme. Each were apparently unaware of the other's illegal activities. Both agents received fairly light sentences. Ulbricht, not so much. He received two life sentences, pretty harsh for someone convicted of a none violent crime. Somehow he still has access to a computer. He posts on Twitter quite frequently.

This makes The Social Network look like a documentary. I could forgive the use of creative license if the story wasn't so poorly mashed together.

Maybe I'm biased because Nick Bilton's book was so good but short of some decent acting there's little here to make it an enjoyable watch, let alone a half true retelling of the actual events.

I wish they had stuck to the original story. The corrupted FBI agent was one narrative and the scammer was another. They just mixed everything up in an over-dramatized & cliched way. I have consumed so much of Ross's story to know this could have been done better.

While the subject matter of this film is certainly intriguing, the execution leaves much to be desired. Rather than focusing on the main protagonist, the film spends an excessive amount of time on a peripheral character, the cop. As a result, the heart of the story is lost, and the film ultimately falls short.

It's disappointing that the filmmakers chose to take a half-fictionalized approach to this topic. The subject matter is weighty and deserves a more serious treatment, perhaps in the form of a documentary. By trying to combine elements of both fiction and non-fiction, the film ends up feeling disjointed and unsatisfying.

Overall, while there are certainly interesting moments in the film, it ultimately fails to do justice to its subject matter. A more focused, documentary-style approach may have been more appropriate for this particular story.

Aside from the uninspired writing, I did enjoy watching Silk Road. Story is familiar to most; the story of the guy that created and run the illegal website via the tor network which was selling all kinds of illegal things online... parallel to that was the story of a corrupt cop who was after Silk Road.

The movie connects both stories and gives us a bit of the cliches that we are used to in this kind of fast-illegal-success story which ends up bad for the protagonist.

I don't have a particular interest about the clear depiction of this story and how truthful it was presented on screen; I m only interested in the quality of the film and how entertaining it was.

It is still just a film and not a documentary so adjust your expectations.

Overall, it's an interesting film to watch on a sleepless night or on a Saturday afternoon and get an idea of the Silk Road story. Also Jason Clarke gives a decent performance here as the cop and makes this film a tad more interesting. However, the writing could have been much better and create a background for the ideological base of the protagonist. Also the dialogues are dull at times and the editing is not helping either. Maybe some more info on the way he created Silk Road would be more interesting for the viewer and also the way he hid himself and the website from the authorities for that long. There are indeed mentions on all the above throughout the film, but they r brushed off rather fast.

The backbone of the story is nevertheless interesting, so if you start this film, you ll probably stick to it wanting to see how it's gonna play out, even if you kinda know how... Mildly interesting and entertaining, 6/10.