The Hummingbird Project: Film Review

The Hummingbird Project: Film Review

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgaard, Salma Hayek
Director: Kim Nguyen

Eisenberg and Skarsgaard team up in this seems-like-it's-true story of two cousins, who work in the high frequency trading market.

Eisenberg is Vinny Zaleski, a dreamer who has a vision of building a pipe across America to get the futures stocks before anyone else, and therefore make more money. A balding Skarsgaard is the more introverted Anton, a coder and over-thinker whose job it is is to shave vital milliseconds off the travelling data tube.

As they put in motion the plans for their fibre-optic dreams, reality starts to intrude - and their former boss (Hayek, in greying wig) starts to take them on.

The Hummingbird Project is a film that's a little too dry to engage in its obvious underdog trappings.

Eisenberg brings his trademark fast patter and slightly annoying edges to Vinny, resulting in an ingenue that's hard to back from the off. Equally, Skarsgaard is so dialled down in his closed down Anton that his spouting about neutrinos and milliseconds is enough to make you detach completely.

These are characters that you don't fully engage in and at times, in this story where you want the underdog to win, it's a crippling factor.

That's not to say Nguyen doesn't deploy the film with a degree of skill; it just occasionally could have used a little more urgency. Though, in fairness, this is a film that's more interested in the two main characters rather than supporting players. Unfortunately, their surface deep personalities don't add much to the mix.

A little more depth over why Vinny is so driven would have helped, and could have lifted The Hummingbird Project into something of the realm of the truly thrilling, as opposed to the occasionally drab.