The Hum­ming­bird Project

Named after the mil­lisec­ond it takes for a hummingbird’s wing to beat one time, The Hum­ming­bird Project is about a plucky pair of cousins attempt­ing to build a fibre optic cable line from Kansas to Wall Street that’s a mil­lisec­ond faster than the com­pe­ti­tion and will sub­se­quent­ly give their trad­ing com­pa­ny a cru­cial, lucra­tive edge in con­trol­ling the flow of the stock market.

Fast-talk­ing Vicent (Jesse Eisen­berg, chan­nelling the same twitchy intel­lect he gave Mark Zucker­berg in The Social Net­work) and his cod­ing genius cousin Anton (Alexan­der Skars­gård wear­ing a bald cap), have plen­ty of chem­istry, but the film fails to give us a true sense of the risks involved and there­fore lacks the kind of high stakes ten­sion films about finance need to thrive.

Salma Hayek, play­ing the cousins’ for­mer boss, brings ener­gy to pro­ceed­ings as she tries to stop the pair’s dodgy plan in its tracks. A sub­plot con­cern­ing an ill­ness also brings a sense of dra­mat­ic urgency. Yet as skilled a direc­tor as Kim Nguyen is (his excel­lent 2012 film War Witch should be seen by every­one), it’s hard to make a movie about peo­ple lay­ing cable feel tru­ly exciting.

The obser­va­tion that peo­ple work­ing in finance have a knack of bury­ing their dirt (or, in this case, cables) deep is cer­tain­ly a fair one, but the film is ulti­mate­ly too mud­dled in its approach to suc­ceed as a com­men­tary on late cap­i­tal­ism, switch­ing from crime thriller to bud­dy flick in a way that will make you dizzy. Vin­cent goes from being some­one out to get all that he can – no mat­ter who he steps on in the process – to a man with a mushy emo­tion­al core. The character’s cathar­sis is nei­ther earned nor believable.

Nguyen deserves cred­it for cre­at­ing an intel­li­gent orig­i­nal sto­ry about the murky world of finance that will force many to look at Wall Street trad­ing from a fresh angle, but while it just does enough to hold your atten­tion in the moment this is a film you’re like­ly to for­get as soon as the cred­its roll. The Hum­ming­bird Project could have been great had Nguyen dialled up the decep­tive themes of mod­ern cap­i­tal­ism rather than strain­ing to find heart in an indus­try that doesn’t appear to have one.