Rob Reviews "Nuremberg"

James Vanderbilt has a penchant for historically significant stories to direct.  His first film, Truth, dealt with the “60 Minutes” report about George W. Bush’s military service, and his sophomore effort in Nuremberg goes even deeper.

Anyone hip to history knows where this is going: based on the book “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist” by Jack El-Hai, it’s hard to use the phrase “this is the story of,” and unfortunately that is my biggest issue here.  Opening with the apprehension of Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), this script follows a number of different things going on concurrently.  The main focus (if one can call it that) is his dealings with army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) as he looks to get into his charge’s mind en route to the famous Nuremberg trials following World War II, where a number of German war criminals were taken as a group to a swift trial conducted by a number of nations under one tribunal.

Had this been more about that dynamic and the mind games therein, this would be a MUCH better film while keeping the issues Kelley has with his superiors and other relationships he develops in references during those conversations.  Instead, there is uneven jumping between those preparations and the establishment of the trials overall through prosecutor Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon), a rival psychiatrist (Colin Hanks), and even the no-nonsense pushback from Col. Burton C. Andrus (John Slattery), and that muddies up the whole thing.

With a cast like this, I was nothing short of STOKED to see this, and it does have upsides.  The cinematography from Dariusz Wolski (Napoleon, The Last Duel) is nothing short of stunning, reflecting the darkness of the story with the color palette to convey that to the audience, and of course the cast is outstanding.  However, no matter how strong these things are, they cannot make up for a script that simply waters itself down to try to balance all of these stories into one, and that is said for a film that clears the two-and-a-half hour mark.

While Nuremberg is not a bad film by any means, I feel like it could be so much more than it is.  It DOES make me want to go back and do a compare and contrast with 1961’s Judgment at Nuremberg (which is not the exact same story, but re-piqued my interest).  Granted, if you want to do both to see if they work hand-in-hand, block out a day (that is a total of almost six hours of movie watching), but I cannot in all honesty request that you rush out to see it.  Again, it’s good but not great, but it could be better with some tweaking to the editing and even separating the stories out for a mini-series.