Recensioni de* critic*

A film about boring tunnels and crunching numbers has no right being this entertaining, although writer-director Kim Nguyen wisely throws wildcard plot devices like terminal disease and an FBI investigation into the mix to add to the jeopardy.

Although sometimes it gets bogged down in the details of drilling, "The Hummingbird Project" extracts enough entertainment value from an unpromising premise, greatly helped by Jesse Eisenberg finding the humanity in his hustler.

[A] sketchy question mark of a film [that] proves so left-field it risks seeming esoteric or – with its technical dialogue on the matter of “neutrino messaging” – openly baffling... We get intriguing ideas, images and locations, and enough closeups of excavation equipment to enrapture plant-hire enthusiasts. With few narrative or thematic hook-ups, though, I guarantee plenty of head scratching in front of this curio.

As skilled a director as Kim Nguyen is... it’s hard to make a movie about people laying cable feel truly exciting... "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.

There probably hasn't been a drama about the economics and morality of commercial infrastructure investment this deep since Wall Street, and the dearth has been because it's hard to make it exciting... What makes The Hummingbird Project so intriguing is that it explores areas of business – and of industrial espionage – so esoteric that it's hard to imagine that it's really a business model.

What might have made for either a thrilling, high-stakes drama or, at the very least, an intelligent comedy, ends up wildly uneven... Strong performances from the leads help to bolster it, but Nguyen’s commentary on structural inequality within the financial system falls flat.

“The Hummingbird Project” lays in its moral a little too neatly near the end, like a straight line of extraneous underground cable. Still: It moves well, looks good on a budget — Nguyen shot it in Quebec and Ontario — and tells its peculiar story with confidence.

[The film] 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! Unless you have a Verizon Fios fetish, this might be rough going.

[Skarsgård] is often the best part of anything he’s in, but here he’s uncanny... He has played wife-beaters, vampires, rapists, and mute would-be detectives, but who’d have thought he’d make a credible nerd? It’s exciting to watch him moan and talk to himself and pace back and forth in a motel room before a bank of computer screens. He puts the hum in "The Hummingbird Project."

A smartly entertaining and unexpectedly human film... Eisenberg is at his motormouth-New Yorker best; Skarsgard, light-years away from his slickly sexy Perry in “Big Little Lies,” deftly disappears here as a balding, hulking wonk; and Hayek, sporting weird, Cruella de Vil-adjacent hair, is a scary hoot as Eva.

Tonally schizophrenic and narratively challenged, “The Hummingbird Project” has pieces of a good movie, yet struggles to assemble them properly. [It] rushes from one theme to the next with the blistering speed of an Indy 500 driver delivering pizzas. And while a number of fantastic performances elevate the film, the drag of the script’s unfocused burdens keeps it from truly taking off.

“The Hummingbird Project” may be too committed to its popcorn mechanics to double as a truly brainy exposé, but it pays other dividends. Eisenberg adds unexpected shades of humanity to his lizard persona from “The Social Network,” while a bald, unrecognizable Skarsgard pulls off the difficult feat of being sympathetically antisocial as a coder driven batty by his work.