[imagesource: Times-Herald]

Ross Ulbricht can tell the sort of story that, if you were to hear it around the braai, you would say was utter nonsense.

His rise to prominence as the founder of Silk Road, a dark net website that sold everything from drugs to weapons, and subsequent arrest was tailor-made for Hollywood.

The only real surprise is that it’s taken this long, but we finally have Silk Road, from writer-director Tiller Russell.

More from Deadline:

Russell’s narrative feature debut centers on Ross Ulbricht (Nick Robinson), a 26-year-old college grad whose Libertarian obsessions led him to create Silk Road. The dark net website offered illegal drugs for sale through the Tor technology that allowed users’ IPs and identities to be invisible and payment through Bitcoin so the money trail cannot be traced.

Thus, the USPS, Amazon, FedEx and others unwittingly were delivering drugs directly to user doorsteps from the first website devoted to their sale.

For two years from 2011 until 2013, when Ulbricht finally was brought down by the DEA and FBI and worth $28 million at the time, this guy had everyone outsmarted…

That review says the movie delivers the goods, and heaps praise on Robinson for his performance, although other outlets have been far less kind.

Take in the trailer before we delve deeper on that front:

The film’s US cinema release date was this past Friday (February 19), so there was a barrage of reviews over the weekend.

New York Times critic Glenn Kenny was unforgiving, saying “it could have been a nail-biter, but ended up a limp snooze”, and Variety’s Owen Gleiberman called it “undercooked”.

Given how astounding the actual story is, it’s disappointing that Silk Road hasn’t smashed it out of the park.

I guess we now wait for the eight-part Netflix true-crime version.

[source:deadline]