Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure you won’t care as much as the characters in writer/director Kim Nguyen’s tonally confused feature do. This one works overtime, shifting gears repeatedly without once providing enough substance for the viewer to engage. It keeps trying on new genre outfits like an undecided shopper—here’s a comedic element, now here’s some thriller crumbs, and oh yes, a tragic illness for good measure! Far more gonzo movies have worked just fine in this manner, but ask yourself if you’d inherently give one iota of a damn about two guys who want to run one thousand miles of fiber optic cable so they can upstage the impossible-to-upstage Salma Hayek. Unless you have a Verizon Fios fetish, this might be rough going.
“The Hummingbird Project” never lets us know how we’re supposed to feel about these characters and their quest. Eisenberg is in “The Social Network” mode: obnoxious and completely devoid of any audience sympathy. Thankfully, he’s very good at that, but to what end? He's often mean to Anton, who’s possibly on the spectrum. He yells at Amish people and forsakes his own health for his obsession. Now, many a great piece of art has been made about doomed men enmeshed in their fixations—Ahab had his whale and Fitzcarraldo had his steamship. Vincent has his millisecond, and not a bunch of them, either. Just one millisecond. Granted, there’s a lot of money to be obtained with that millisecond, but from a dramatic standpoint, it’s a very dry concept. And this is a computer guy talking here.
The year is 2011 and Eva Torres (Salma Hayek) is a tough-as-nails power broker whose High Frequency Trading desk hires only the best traders and programmers. Anton and Vincent represent the crème-de-la-crème, so Torres is far from pleased when they decide to abruptly quit. Unbeknownst to Torres, the duo, along with drilling expert Mark (Michael Mando), have obtained seemingly bottomless financing to lay cable from Kansas to New Jersey in an attempt to get data quicker than Torres can. This project appears to be doomed from the start: even if they manage to drill from Dorothy Gale’s pre-Oz location through the Appalachians and into my beloved home state, the data won’t go through any faster unless Anton can make his code run one millisecond faster.
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