In 2010, Jesse Eisenberg first caught our attention as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network directed by David Finch. Since then, the 35-year-old actor has played a series of weird characters, and he is very good at playing such roles. Whether it's the "Amazing Bandits" series or "The Waste Wood Agent", Eisenberg's performance is outstanding.
Who would have thought that Lex Luthor would be a socially incompetent tech otaku tycoon? Whether this kind of role stereotyping is a good thing or a bad thing for an actor's career, the benevolent see the benevolent and the wise see the wise.
In the thriller film Project Hummingbird, inspired by Michael Lewis's nonfiction novel High-Frequency Traders: Wall Street's Speed Game, Eisenberg plays an overconfident geek who, together with his highly intelligent cousin, devised a genius business plan. The two quit their jobs to build a fiber-optic line between Kansas and New Jersey that would enable high-frequency trading. While we're not experts on this, the images presented in the film will make you understand that winning or losing a business competition depends heavily on whether you can get a head start in milliseconds, the amount of time it takes a hummingbird to flap its wings once.
Because of this, in this 111-minute thriller, the two protagonists not only need to convince investors, but also lose sleep because of mathematical formulas. It is worth mentioning that director Nguyen Kim tells this somewhat boring topic very well, and once you start to pay attention to the fate of the characters in the film, you will always be immersed in it. As most morality stories tell us, there is no good end to trying to play tricks and shortcuts in the business game.
In Project Hummingbird, Eisenberg does his best play, speaking quickly and showing a look of pain. The entrepreneur he plays who suffers from stomach cancer but still pursues his dreams is admirable. In an unexpectedly heartbreaking scene, he walks into a massage parlor, asks if sexual services are available, and then goes on a therapeutic massage, possibly to relieve the pressure he's been facing all along. As the masseuse's hand rubbed his shoulder, he broke down and cried.
The other male lead is played by Alexander Skarsgaard. The Swedish actor is no longer the big man we are familiar with in the TV series "True Love Like Blood" and "Tarzan Returns: The Jungle", in this film he wears a bald wig and plays a technical man who is extremely intelligent but whose emotional intelligence is inversely proportional to IQ. The character is easy to draw attention to, but Skarsgard doesn't act too deliberately to feel too overwhelmed, but instead fun creates another flawed character that we empathize with.
In addition, Michael Mando (Spider-Man: Homecoming) plays a contractor involved in the project. Salma Hayek ("Ace Bodyguard") plays the former boss of the two male protagonists, taking advantage of his fierce appearance and Mexican accent to aggressively threaten the two brothers.
The film conveys a lot of social messages, and as the film progresses, you will see that large-scale construction projects destroy peace and quiet in the forest, and farmers who seek tranquility are forced to give way to technology. In these wonderful performances, you can't help but think about the price that we ordinary people pay to keep up with this rapidly evolving digital world.