A foray into crime on the dark web

 

   Silk Road, a movie about an entrepreneurial young man who enters the drug trade, is based on a Rolling Stone article by David Kushner. I hadn't read the article which appeared in 2014, so I was only vaguely familiar with the story about how Ross Ulbricht (Nick Robinson) built a thriving drug market on the dark web. 

   Perhaps to salve his conscience, Ulbricht cloaked his felonious activity in fuzzy libertarian thinking, constructing rationales about the moral obligation to evade regulation, an argument that has a familiar ring thanks to some of today’s more strident anti-government voices.

    So, no, I didn't know much about Ulbricht's story, and wasn't familiar with his early forays into the mysteries of Bitcoin. But that doesn't mean that director Tiller Russell's high-tech procedural didn't feel familiar, another cynical foray into a badly corrupted world.

    Having said that, I can’t say that familiarity bred much by way of contempt, maybe because the movie hits enough genre marks to prove modestly engaging.

    Russell tempers the technical aspects of Ulbricht's story by setting up a stylistic conflict between Ulbricht and a grab-em-by-the-throat cop, played by Jason Clarke, whose performance holds the movie together. 

   Compromised and decidedly old-school in his approach to policing, Clarke's Rick Bowden, has been banished to a cyber-sleuthing unit of the DEA. He's just gotten out of rehab for his own drug abuse.

     Populated by hot-shots with advanced degrees, the cyber crimes unit instantly turns Bowden into the proverbial fish out of water. But he refuses to sit on his hands. 

     Desperate to catch up with his younger colleagues, he recruits a small-time criminal from his former life (Darrell Britt-Gibson) to teach him about computers and the dark web.

    Bowden attains enough mastery of the online world to create an artificial persona that puts him into close cyber association with the young man he's hunting.

    Amoral and ambitious, we know from the outset that Ulbricht's hubris eventually will lead his downfall and it hardly qualifies as a surprise when his girlfriend (Alexandra Shipp) begins sounding alarms about dangerous behavior.

    Tiller, who also wrote the movie's screenplay, does a reasonably good job of untangling the complexities of Ulbricht's scheme and there's enough upholstery (glimpses of Ulbricht's family and of Bowden's domestic life) to save the movie from one-note repetition.

    In keeping with the movie's cynicism, Bowden never emerges as a heroic figure. We're in a world where blurred lines prove pervasive, not exactly a groundbreaking slant for movies of this ilk but a genre requirement nonetheless.

  Who knows? Silk Road may turn out to be a pioneering effort as cybercrime begins to replace street crime in the pop-cultural vocabulary. Or, perhaps it's just another straight-on helping of big-screen crime. 

    That’s not a bad thing but it doesn’t make for the most memorable of movies.

A girl in a bubble falls in love

Amandla Stenberg played Rue in The Hunger Games, an adaptation of a popular piece of YA fiction. In Everything, Everything, Stenberg returns to the YA universe, this time in a less-than-credible story about an 18-year-old who suffers from an immune deficiency so severe it has made her allergic to nearly everything. Stenberg's Maddie lives in a fairly luxurious bubble. She shares a sealed, modern home with her mother (Anika Toni Rose), a physician. When new folks move next door, young Olly (Nick Robinson)tries to break through Maddie's hermetic shields. Taken with Olly, Maddie wants out of the house in which she's spent her whole life. She's eager to pursue her first love interest. Not surprisingly Maddie's mother objects: Having already lost her husband and a son in an automobile accident, Mom can't abide losing another child. Director Stella Meghie understands how to showcase two appealing young actors, but the movie gets worse, the more you think about it. Based on a well-received novel by Nicola Yoon, Everything, Everything may satisfy its teen audience, but it translates to the screen as YA fluff with major plot holes. And in this romantic fantasy, an isolated girl sports a surprisingly large and trendy wardrobe for a kid who never leaves the house.

No splash from predictable '5th Wave'

In what appears to be another hunt for franchise gold, The Fifth Wave is now reading across the nation's multiplexes. A big-screen adaptation of a 2013 novel by Rick Yancey, 5th Wave stars Chloe Grace Moretz as Cassie Sullivan, a high school student whose normal life is disrupted when an ominous alien spaceship appears above her Ohio hometown. Dull, predictable and, at times, laughable, The Fifth Wave turns Cassie into a quasi-action figure after she loses her parents; she's also put in a position where she must rescue her younger brother (Zackary Arthur) from soldiers who say (wink! wink!) that they're members of the US Army. Liev Schreiber portrays the commander who leads these supposedly helpful troops. Cassie eventually receives assistance from a hunky young man (Alex Roe), who learns about the girlish crush she once had on high school footballer Ben Parish (Nick Robinson). Just about every character seems to have been cut from typical YA cloth, and even the aliens are strictly off-the-rack: They're able to assume human form. Only Maika Monroe's Ringer brings any edge to the proceedings. She's a young woman who can out-tough any young man. Director J Blakeson occasionally allows the movie to fall into soporific lulls, and I wouldn't call it fun to see a perpetually troubled-looking Moretz running around with a semi-automatic weapon. Add a few medium-grade effects sequences depicting alien-induced catastrophes, and you wind up with a movie that may offer something to young fans of the novel and little for anyone else.

Boys seek indepedence in the woods

The Kings of Summer doesn't quite rule, but it has its charms.

Every summer, a small movie looks as if it's poised to be the season's sleeper hit. Put The Kings of Summer into that aspirational category, but don't bet the rent that it will fulfill any record-breaking ambitions.

That's not to say that The Kings of Summer -- the story of three teen-agers who leave home and build a ramshackle cabin in the woods -- is charmless, but rather to caution that
the movie's overall impact matches its modesty.

Besides, it must mean something that the most interesting performance in this movie about teen rebellion is given by Nick Offerman, an adult best known for his work on NBC's Parks and Recreation. Offerman's deadpan style, wry delivery and willingness to portray a less-than-admirable dad helps spike the movie's adolescent punch.

It's just that kind of mildly mordant touch that keeps Kings of Summer from falling into a sink pit of teen-movie cliches.

The movie begins in earnest when 15-year-old Joe (Nick Robinson) gets crosswise with his dad during an aggressively competitive Monopoly game. We understand why Joe and his dad channel emotion into Monopoly. They're both having a rough go after the death of Joe's mother.

Joe's embittered dad slams the boy with withering verbal assaults, delivered without inflection by Offerman who knows how to play a guy who's fed up with life and seems to expect nothing much from it.

What's an aggrieved 15-year-old to do? Joe decides to round up a buddy and head for the woods. He convinces his friend Patrick (Gabriel Basso) to join him. Patrick is eager to escape the clutches of his self-absorbed parents (an amusing Megan Mullally and Marc Evan Jackson).

Another youngster, the oddball Biaggio (Moises Arias) worms his way into the group, providing what every movie about teen-agers needs: the unashamedly weird kid.

Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts, working from a screenplay by Chris Galletta, finds humor in the fact that the boys aren't natural woodsmen. When they hunt for food, a self-sufficiency pledge goes by the boards: It doesn't hurt that the boys' foray into the wilderness takes place within walking distance of a chicken restaurant. So much for living off the land.

The alliance between buddies is challenged when Patrick and Joe square off in the game of love. Joe has a crush on Kelly (Erin Moriarty). She likes Joe, but might be more inclined toward Patrick. When Kelly shows up, the boyhood paradise begins to crumble, something we knew would happen all along, possibly because the house the boys build looks as if it's been engineered for collapse.

The young actors give strong performances, and Vogt-Roberts makes room for a couple of scenes in which the boys get in touch with their primal selves.

It's a bit of a stretch to believe that three kids could pull off this kind of disappearing act, but unless they do, there's no movie. And maybe Vogt-Roberts means to suggest that, to some degree, the adults are allowing these kids room to fail.

Whatever its deficiencies, Kings of Summer earns points for understanding what it's like to be 15 and fed up with life at home -- but not entirely prepared to leave it.