

(The film is set in 2012 so this madcap scheme is a multimillion dollar gamble that will quickly become obsolete.) The idea is to gain a millisecond of information advantage – the speed of a hummingbird’s wing beat – for a head start that could bring in billions from shares. An overture of spinning newspapers notes that there have been dozens of stock market crashes since 1929.īoardroom meetings, led by a silver-haired and delightfully camp Salma Hayek, are debates over the relative merits of neutrino messaging versus microwave towers.Īlexander Skarsgård, sporting a mostly bald head and sloping shoulders, is impressive and almost unrecognisable as Anton Zaleski, the tech-geek code-writing cousin of The Hummingbird Project’s protagonist, Vincent Zaleski (a familiar and weaselly turn by Jesse Eisenberg), has hatched a plan to lay a high-speed cable under the Appalachians and other far-flung spots. There’s a great deal of capitalist-splaining going on in the new film from Canadian auteur Kim Nguyen (War Witch, Two Lovers and a Bear).

Choose from Same Day Delivery, Drive Up or Order Pickup. 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.If you see only one Canadian-Belgian drama about high-frequency trading and ultra-low latency direct market access this week, then maybe consider The Hummingbird Project if you’re stuck? Read reviews and buy The Hummingbird Project (Blu-ray)(2019) at Target. 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 character’s catharsis is neither earned nor believable. A pair of high-frequency traders go up against their old boss in an effort to make millions in a fiber-optic cable deal. With Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgård, Salma Hayek, Michael Mando. 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 Hummingbird Project: Directed by Kim Nguyen. 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.
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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.

A subplot concerning an illness also brings a sense of dramatic urgency. Starring: Jesse EisenbergAlexander SkarsgårdSalma Hayek. Salma Hayek, playing the cousins’ former boss, brings energy to proceedings as she tries to stop the pair’s dodgy plan in its tracks. Two cousins (Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgård) dream to build a fiber-optic cable line making them millions. 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.įast-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. The companys filing status is listed as Active and its File Number is 1166294-5.The companys principal address is 581 High St, Southampton, ON N0H 2L0 CA. The thrill-a-minute world of fibre-optic cable laying backdrops this uneven tale of humanity versus capitalism. Hummingbirds Canada: The National Hummingbird Project is a Canada General Business filed On October 3, 2019.
