Rami Malek is saddled with handsomeness of a curious kind.

His jaw is sharp, his eyes are saucered, and his gym work has produced a jumpy, feline athleticism. But the sum of his all fails to combobulate.

When his psychologist lopes onto the screen of Nuremberg, a 2025 film written poorly and directed inexplicably by James Vanderbilt, Malek inhabits a Pixar identity, singularly unequal to taking on a bunch of Nazis.

Several times throughout this long movie, I wondered if Rami had actually read the script and not just learnt his lines.

Russell Crowe, Gott sei Dank, fully understands the movie he is in.

His Australian star-studded podginess fills the screen in its opening minutes. We see the dastardly Herman Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe, in his moment of being permanently grounded.

It is a pleasure to love a hater when he hates charismatically. But such delights must come with some pain. Crowe’s Göring is tethered to Malek’s psychologist throughout the script. The former delivers a tour de force evocation of a human monster, despite performing opposite a human cartoon.

Nuremberg is a film which chooses everything on the menu, and gets confused when it all arrives at once. We, the audience, are relegated to busboys, tasked with bringing order to avarice.

Douglas Kelley is a shrink of the two-dimensional kind, prone to magic tricks, pretty journalists and discovering the goddamn obvious. Kelley reveals himself as breathtakingly uncurious regarding the world and people who surround him.

The most egregious of the great ignored is Howie (Leo Woodall), a translator, who has to wait until the last moment to expose who the hell he is, because Kelley has failed to pose the most rudimentary questions.

***

The Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46 posed profound questions relevant to 20th and 21st century life; philosophical themes such as the meaning of guilt, the limits of personal responsibility, and the human desire for retribution.

At the time, they became marred in controversy, condemned as victors’ justice and dangerously tone-deaf to the learnings of its World War I equivalent, Versailles.

Nuremberg, the movie, poses the question of how its tangled plot can untangle itself within 90 minutes.

The answer is that it cannot – and it demands 148 seated minutes to stack all the plates it has chosen to spin.

Vanderbilt is dedicated to the dumbest member of his audience.

At one moment Justice Jackson (Michael Shannon) has the geopolitical intricacies of wartime Europe explained to him. Ostensibly a sophisticated conversation among experts, the map of Europe on the table features zero detail, each country painted in primary colours, their names emblazoned in the manner of Hanna-Barbera.

The director’s aesthetic choices fare not much better. Ten minutes in, I became convinced that his Serbian art director (Tibor Lázár) had phoned in a few vague ideas before taking off to a German spa-town for the duration.

One scene shows civilians marching home in May 1945 at the end of war. They slough by burnt-out vehicles clearly meant to read as epic. In fact, the jeeps are more likely the winning papier-mâché entry of a Belgrade school project.

Arching my back into the cinema seat, I was close to hissing ‘cheap!’, until I remembered the other viewer might hear.

***

And yet, and yet – two performances in Nuremberg had me glued.

Leo Woodall’s Howie has an affecting early scene of such depth, that he is an actor I now will follow with curiosity.

And then there’s the old bird named Crowe.

I had forgotten how delicious his voice is. I love how corpulent he has become. And oh my word, that man’s Göring was riveting to watch live and see die.

And so, I declare Nuremberg a disaster, out of which some good has come.

Much like the trials, indeed.