In The Hummingbird Project, two brothers take on Wall Street power in a race to build a fiber-optic cable network from Kansas City to New York City. They plan to take advantage of getting financial data several nanoseconds before everyone else and to become zillionaires. Vincent (Jesse Eisenberg) is the wheeler-dealer and Anton (Alexander Skarsgård) is the technical whiz. It’s a ridiculously audacious bet, and the movie is about whether they can pull it off.
Their ruthless Wall Street competition is personalized in the character played by Salma Hayek. Hayek is okay, but she appears to be performing in a different (and better) movie than the other leads.
The Hummingbird Project doesn’t quite work. Eisenberg is not a stranger to jittery, fast-talking roles. But here, he accelerates into auctioneer-pacing, and he speaks so quickly that it’s hard to follow. There’s too much film footage invested in the cable-laying procedural. And why the hell does Vincent return a THIRD time to visit the Amish farmers in the rainstorm?
There are two good scenes in The Hummingbird Project, both involving Anton. In one, he decides to physically run away from the FBI and, in the other, he exacts some hacking revenge on the Wall Street baddies.
I saw The Hummingbird Project at Cinequest, and it is now playing in Bay Area theaters.