Review: Plodding 'The Hummingbird Project' fails as financial thriller

“The Hummingbird Project” — ★ ½

There's a lot of smoke and mirrors in “The Hummingbird Project,” a financial thriller that employs the kind of just-plausible-enough dialogue to make you not only think it could happen, but that it did happen. When Vinny Zaleski — played by Jesse Eisenberg, doing his trademark neurotic shtick — and his balding, bespectacled computer-whiz cousin, Anton (Alexander Skarsgard, geeked out to the point of unrecognizability), start bandying about terms like “neutrino messaging” and “pulse-shaping microwave towers” in their pursuit of a better way to game the New York Stock Exchange, it will sound, to most listeners, just as comprehensible as any conversation on the bridge of the starship Enterprise.

But the fact that Vinny and Anton plan to making a killing by building a fiber-optic tunnel from Kansas to New Jersey — thereby shaving off one millisecond in the speed of electronic transactions on the exchange — situates the story in a world that feels real-ish, even though the larger than life characters are fictional.

It's a world of ones and zeros in which the battle lines are starkly drawn. On the one side are the Zaleskis, who simultaneously quit their Wall Street day jobs to build that tunnel, courtesy of a rich venture capitalist (Frank Schorpion). On the other side is the cousins' old boss, Eva Torres (Salma Hayek, in a fun, scenery-chewing turn as an entrepreneur who acts as if she owns her employees). Vinny at one point characterizes the conflict between the two sides as a clash between a modern-day David and Goliath, and in some ways it is.

But the way that conflict plays out is surprisingly plodding.

Much of the film revolves around the minutiae of the Zaleskis' enterprise: negotiating land rights; troubleshooting drilling headaches; and coding, coding, coding. To alleviate that, writer-director Kim Nguyen injects some melodrama into the mix: a health scare involving one of the protagonists, along with the threat of legal action by Eva, and her sudden interest in a form of alternate technology that would make the Zaleskis' plan obsolete.

It all feels a bit contrived.

More interesting is the question of why Vinny and Anton are doing this in the first place, despite their terrible odds of success. Vinny, at times, seems less motivated by the love of money than by his love for Anton, a kind of childlike savant who dreams of a house in the country with hummingbirds in the yard. At other times, Vinny seems driven by his hatred of Eva, which isn't really supported by anything else in the story.

In the end, the most intriguing thing about “The Hummingbird Project” — and it isn't all that intriguing — is the realization that the movie isn't a David-vs.-Goliath tale after all, but one about two Goliaths.

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Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgard, Salma Hayek

Directed by: Kim Nguyen

Other: A Belga Productions release. Rated R for language. 111 minutes