Nuremberg Review – Russell Crowe is first rate as Goring during the trial but Rami Malek ignores | film

HHere is a movie that promises you the most beautiful true stories from history. Before the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg that began in November 1945, an obscure US Army psychiatrist named Dr. Douglas Kelly was ordered to interview prisoners, the chief of whom was Hermann Goering. This was supposed to prove their fitness to stand trial, but was actually intended to obtain inside information about how their defense was being conducted. Russell Crowe is brilliantly cast as the portly, arrogant Marshall Goringe. He is the best he has been in a long time, a cunning and cunning manipulator playing a psychological game of cat and mouse with the Americans.

But there’s a particularly ridiculous performance from Rami Malek as Kelly: an interesting, smiling, enigmatic, and surprisingly interesting performance that makes it seem as if Malek is auditioning for the role of Hitler in The Producers. Leo Woodall plays US Army translator Huey Trist, Michael Shannon is US Attorney General Robert H. Jackson, and Richard E. Grant plays British Conservative MP David Maxwell Fyfe who (for all his fame from a post-war career as Home Secretary of gay persecution, which helped drive Alan Turing to his grave), actually turns out to have been crucial to interrogating Nazis. All of these actors do their best, but the character of Kelly himself is a ridiculous caricature.

The real Kelly certainly appears to have been a mercurial character and made no secret of his desire to write a book about the trial, which he hoped would be his ticket to glory. But the film also wants to make him a decent, traditional hero, and can’t accommodate much (or any) believable nuance. Kelly Malik is a bag of acting tricks, full of erratic mannerisms; He doesn’t look all that different from the villain Malik that Bond once played.