As convincing as Hayek is, shes completely wasted with her minimal screen time.

The title The Hummingbird Project refers to the millisecond it takes for a hummingbirds wing to beat one time, I think.

Or maybe it hints at the future home that coder Anton Zaleski ( Alexander Skarsgrd ) dreams about, a domicile where the little birdies flit outside with impunity.

This would give his trading company an infinitesimal yet crucial timing edge over other traders.

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 shopperheres a comedic element, now heres 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 youd 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.

Eisenberg is in The Social Network mode: obnoxious and completely devoid of any audience sympathy.

Thankfully, hes very good at that, but to what end Hes often mean to Anton, whos 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 fixationsAhab had his whale and Fitzcarraldo had his steamship.

Vincent has his millisecond, and not a bunch of them, either.

Granted, theres a lot of money to be obtained with that millisecond, but from a dramatic standpoint, its a very dry concept.

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.

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 Gales pre-Oz location through the Appalachians and into my beloved home state, the data wont go through any faster unless Anton can make his code run one millisecond faster.

But some of the other ways Vincent gets around topographical and geographical issues come off way too easily.

Theres no suspense, and since nobodys willing to do a deep dive into process (and risk making this even more dull for the regular viewer), we dont feel whats at stake.

Meanwhile, in the thriller aisle of this supermarket of a movie, mean ol Ms.

Hayek shows up every so often to threaten Anton about using his lines of code to do Vincents bidding.

Since he wrote the algorithm for her, its now her intellectual property.

She has a case for sure, but itll be pretty damn hard for her to prove without a printout or one hell of a detailed MRI of Antons brain.

But I digress. Torres keeps showing up like a smokin hot Freddy Krueger, christening Anton with droplets of water while hes in his hot tub and mocking her rivals with graffiti about milliseconds written on rocks deep in the woods.

The Hummingbird Project Full Movie