Directed by James Vanderbilt | Written by Vanderbilt, based on the book The Nazi And The Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai | ▲▲ | In Cinemas 

Vanderbilt’s name wasn’t one I was immediately familiar with before this feature, but his credits as a producer or writer are diverse — David Fincher’s Zodiac, a couple of the less memorable Spider-Man movies, Scream movies, and Adam Sandler movies for Netflix. His first and only effort as a director was a based-on-real-life story of Dan Rather, 60 Minutes, and corporate pressure, Truth, which came and went without much of a splash 10 years ago despite the presence of a starry cast including Robert Redford and Cate Blanchett.

This follow-up is a surprisingly pulpy, fitfully entertaining, and overlong telling of the relationship between a psychiatrist, Dr Douglas Kelly (Rami Malek), and the highest ranking Nazi still living at end of the Second World War, Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), in advance and during the Nazi trials at Nuremberg. The central roles feature about as much scenery chewing as is possible without either actor literally biting into the sets and props. That’s not an endorsement of this movie.

There are times when I watch something and wonder how many desks did this script land on before they settled on the actors in these parts. There’s no doubt Crowe can be effective, but as Göring it feels like he’s entering into his late Orson Welles or Marlon Brando period, it’s all flagrancy and excess — starting with an accent that never quite sticks. Can anyone direct this guy anymore?

Malek is similarly broad, though at least his character manages to stick to a noticeable arc — he’s a psychiatrist very early in that profession for it to be taken seriously, and worse, an amateur magician. The script tries to use the bait and switch of a card trick as some kind of grand allegory, to no real effect. The meat of the thing is the growing connection between Göring and Kelly, but it’s pretty flimsy since it’s clear to us both are lying to the other and the scripts effort to connect them is desperately slim. It squeezes in a few scenes of Douglas getting close to Göring’s wife (Lotte Verbeek) and young daughter, utilizing a montage of good times to awkwardly speed up that connection, further humanizing the Nazi leader by association. It’s inessential, like a lot of what’s going on here.

This central problem of the questionably cast and directed leads would be fatal except the voluminous running time allows for other actors to raise the entire operation with their support: Michael Shannon, John Slattery, Leo Woodall, and Richard E. Grant all get one or more moments that enrich the picture, and the experienced ensemble leads the entire movie closer to what it wants to be, a classic post-war potboiler, but it never really gets there.

The final act is the courtroom drama we know is coming and the likes of which we’ve seen before. Nuremberg lives very much in the shadow of Stanley Kramer’s 1961 feature Judgement At Nuremberg, which dramatized a separate trial of German judicial figures, not the military leaders here, but the echoes are undeniable and they don’t flatter the newer film.

There’s also the question of whether it was appropriate to show actual photos from the concentration camps. They chose to do it in the Kramer film, which justifies the use with the deliberate, deeply solemn procedural that surrounds it, while here that footage provides an emotional reality to this movie that it otherwise doesn’t earn.