The Hummingbird Project

The Hummingbird Project follows stock-market traders (and cousins) Vincent (Jesse Eisenberg) and Anton (Alexander Skarsgård) as they devise a potentially-lucrative (yet complicated and expensive) plan to give them an unprecedented edge in their daily dealings, with the narrative detailing the myriad of professional and personal complications that ensue (including an unexpected medical diagnosis and the encroaching advances of several law-enforcement agents). Filmmaker Kim Nguyen delivers an overlong and occasionally meandering drama that nevertheless contains a handful of striking, compelling sequences, and it’s clear, certainly, that the narrative’s central conceit, which admittedly does remain somewhat inscrutable throughout, is intriguing enough to keep things moving even through the picture’s more overtly slow stretches. There’s little doubt, too, that Eisenberg and especially Skarsgård’s compelling work here goes a long way towards smoothing over the narrative’s various bumps, although it remains somewhat difficult to comprehend just why these two men would go to these lengths to accomplish a seemingly insurmountable task (with this made all-the-more baffling in the wake of the aforementioned medical diagnosis). Still, The Hummingbird Project is a decent-enough endeavor that would’ve benefited from a much shorter running time and, perhaps, a clearer approach to just what the project itself entails (ie it’s explained a few times and even still remains tough to understand).

**1/2 out of ****