Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgård, Salma Hayek, Michael Mando
Distributor: Madman Films
Runtime: 111 mins. Reviewed in Apr 2019
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Like the mammoth endeavour undertaken at the heart of its narrative, ‘The Hummingbird Project’ is wildly ambitious and unexpectedly strange. It doesn’t quite live up to the intriguing promise of its attention-grabbing premise, and its impact is too often undercut by the miscasting of its leading trio, but writer-director Kim Nguyen’s earns himself a fair amount of leeway by virtue of the wholly unique story that he has elected to tell.
Our heroes, Vincent Zaleski (Jesse Eisenberg) and his cousin Anton (Alexander Skarsgård), work for Torres and Thatcher, a finance company based in New York City. Run by the no-nonsense Eva Torres (Salma Hayek), the firm operates in the world of high-frequency trading, a game where speed is everything. Information crucial to their trades must be relayed halfway across North America, from its origin at the Kansas Electronic Exchange to the servers of the New York Stock Exchange, and Anton’s job is to give their traders an edge, employing new technology and developing new algorithms to shave milliseconds off the vital data’s travel time. in short, being the fastest trader in the market – even by as little as a millisecond – is a ticket to print money.
Vincent and Anton quit Torres and Thatcher and strike a deal with a megabucks investor (Frank Schorpion) to finance their grand vision of a lightning-fast information highway, a fibreoptic cable running over one thousand miles underground in a straight line from Kansas to New York. Theoretically reducing the round-trip time of financial data to a mere 16 milliseconds, the completion of this tunnel would give them a distinct first mover advantage in the financial markets and stand to make them millions of dollars, if not billions. They hire logistics whiz Mark (Michael Mando, the onscreen MVP) to help manage the project and soon they’re buying thin strips of real estate 10 feet below people’s homes, from hundreds of landowners across the country, and hiring dozens of tunnelling crews. Their audacious objective delivers as many obstacles as one would expect, from having to tunnel beneath the Appalachian Mountains to an Amish community that refuses to sign Vincent’s contract.
The film makes good use of its plentiful natural locations, sublimely lensed in crisp detail by DP Nicolas Bolduc, and its strangely beautiful and urgent score from Yves Gourmeur. However, rather than make this a straightforward “men on a mission” or “man versus nature” film, writer-director Kim Nguyen gives Vincent and Anton a human adversary, as their former boss Eva soon finds out about their project and charges her own team with developing a faster relay from Kansas to New York. Eva is also not above playing dirty, attacking them professionally and personally with equal fervour. That said, one wonders whether a mortal antagonist was necessary at all, given the fascinating challenges inherently represented by their daunting quest. Nguyen’s script also repeatedly loses focus, branching out into several half-baked subplots that never get the required amount of screen time to be believably developed, like Anton’s family problems and possible descent into mania, or Vincent’s diagnosis with a serious illness. These add up, leading the movie down a mad, melodramatic spiral that just pushes it further away from the strikingly clear-cut goal that first drove our heroes.
The most frustrating problem is that much of the drama is undermined by the actors playing it. The film’s central trio are fundamentally miscast, distracting from the story rather than enhancing it. They’re not bad – Eisenberg gets a wonderfully vulnerable scene at a massage parlour, and you can’t help but respect Skarsgård’s attempt to bury himself physically in a part very much against his type – but you never really buy them in their roles. Vincent is written as the fast-talking, irrepressibly confident one, but Jesse Eisenberg can’t muster the kind of charm that would have you believing his patter. He’s meant to be both Anton’s protector and motivator, but without any real force of personality, he feels more like a hindrance to Anton’s genius. Speaking of Anton – despite doing his best physically, shaving his head and curling his shoulders down into himself, Alexander Skarsgård is similarly unbelievable. He rarely comes across as a genius, nor as an introvert; Skarsgård is simply too much of an alpha male to pull it off. One is left to wonder whether the cousins might have been better off switching roles. Salma Hayek is least credible, never owning Eva’s ruthlessness or cunning (which are basically the character’s only traits if you believe what other characters have to say about her). Michael Mando is the lone lead to escape unscathed, rendering Mark as pragmatism manifest in a pleasantly sharp, unshowy performance.
Given the faults detailed above (common weaknesses that have crippled plenty of films in their own right), I was ultimately surprised to find that I thought that the film was overall passable. The redemptive power of the goodwill that Nguyen generates with his premise just goes to show how important a good story idea is. Some films are powered by excellent performances, others by shocking twists and turns – this one is almost entirely powered by the narrative that it sets up in its opening act. Rather appropriately, this result is as surprising as the actual story that ‘The Hummingbird Project’ tells.
Callum Ryan is an associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film & Broadcasting.
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