Jesse Eisenberg and Alexander Skarsgård (the latter nearly unrecognizable) star as odd-couple cousins who undertake to install a fiber-optic cable between Kansas City and New York in order to speed up the process by which they can buy and sell stock, a practice known as high-frequency trading. A silver-haired Salma Hayek plays their former boss, who tries to outsmart them at their own game. What might have made for either a thrilling, high-stakes drama or, at the very least, an intelligent comedy, ends up wildly uneven—the qualities that differentiate Canadian writer-director Kim Nguyen’s work (e.g. his idiosyncratic 2012 feature War Witch) seem out of place in a film that otherwise adheres to convention. Strong performances from the leads help to bolster it, but Nguyen’s commentary on structural inequality within the financial system falls flat.