Nuremberg is a film concerned about humankind repeating its past mistakes and allowing the horrors of Nazism to rise again. To relay this message, it crafts a reductive bit of historical revisionism that waters down any good intentions it may have started out with.

In this film, our protagonist, Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) is introduced as a leather jacket clad bad boy who hits on women and plans to get rich quick when assigned to diagnose the German high command before they're placed before a military tribunal.

In reality, Kelley was an alcoholic who spent six weeks with the prisoners before being replaced by Gustave Gilbert (Colin Hanks in the film). Gilbert spent six months on site, becoming confidant to the prisoners, particularly Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), whom he interviewed in his native language via translator – not intimately in English, as the film would pretend Kelley did.

In James Vanderbilt's adaptation, Gilbert is a sniveling buffoon who gets tossed around by Kelley's bad boy shrink for being such an idiot. His only part in the film is to weasel in on Kelley's work, an ugly bit of revisionism in the same wheelhouse as the full and complete Americanization of the trials. In reality, the trials lasted for months. They are to this day an important document of a universal effort to categorize and define our failures as one global entity.

In the film, it is a cat and mouse game between a singular bad guy, Göring, and a plucky American. Defeat Göring, you defeat the Nazis, the film says.

Earlier in the film, Michael Shannon's version of Robert H. Jackson goes to the Vatican to blackmail the Pope to help them push through the Nuremberg trials. Jackson argues that it would be in the Pope's best interest, considering how the Vatican acknowledged the German new regime in 1939. Never mind the fact that America saw Nazi rallies on their own soil at the same time.

At Nuremberg, America runs the show. Again, the film asks us to ignore the fact that it took America the longest to even agree to joining. Or that America argued for narrower definitions on crimes against humanity out of fear someone might notice the Jim Crow laws would fall under said crimes.

It's true that historical films rarely get history correct. The world is too complex to be condensed into a two hour recap. You have to allow for freedom to get to a greater truth. The problem is when the film can't decide what truth it's getting at, or when, like Nuremberg, it keeps hammering on about the importance of accountability when it comes to the crimes of other nations. At that point, these flights of fancy become part of the same problem the film tries to address. If we can't agree on the facts, then we have no common ground to build on when we need it the most.

It ought to be said that Nuremberg is a technically proficient bit of filmmaking with a talented cast giving great performances. Russell Crowe, in particular, is as good as he's ever been. His portrait of Göring is chilling and unnervingly charismatic in ways you don't want him to be.

But therein lies the problem: Nuremberg tries to make the statement that the Nazis weren't boogeymen; they weren't mythic beings different from others. They were just men. Yet at every turn, Vanderbilt's simplistic script paints them as exactly the opposite. They are either sneering caricatures out of a Tarantino film, or they are Göring: an imposing mix of Hannibal Lecter and Jack Nicholson from A Few Good Men.

Beyond that, Nuremberg is a reductive and bafflingly paced film. For the first half, we follow the witty banter and silly antics of people putting together one of the most important events of the 20th century. It is presented with the seriousness of a wannabe-Coen brothers movie. Quips fly fast and consistently. It feels like a Boys Own Adventure novel, more fitting as a pastiche of a Clint Eastwood WW2 picture.

Then, Vanderbilt rolls out genuine footage from the holocaust, letting it play out uncut on the big screen. It is the real thing. The actual material shown at Nuremberg. It is heart-wrenching and sickening. In a better film, it would be the moment that anchors the entire film. Here, it feels like a cheap ploy. It feels tacky and undeserved to exist in the same realm where Vanderbilt almost immediately follows the scene up with a gag about Kelley being a womanizer.

And the less said about Malik teaching Crowe magic ("was ist abracadabra?"), the better. Or the fact that Vanderbilt reduces the entirety of the press into a single femme fatale who, it is insinuated, seduces and gets Kelley drunk so she can con him out of information for a scoop.

There are traces of a more complex and nuanced film floating about the place. One of them, involving the implication that America organized a show trial to ensure a public eradication of Nazi beliefs, is the most compelling one. It asks how far should we be willing to bend the law to ensure evil is wiped off the face of the planet. But the film has no intention of following up on that dilemma. Instead, the audience gets uplifting music and a character happily declaring "we got 'em!", as if this was a John Grisham adaption.

That's because any answers to such questions would open up a can of worms nobody, least of all this film, wants to deal with. It would require acknowledgment over the current state of the world, especially the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and it would force us to take a long, hard look at ourselves.

Instead, Nuremberg settles for fairytales. It pretends to want the truth but, to paraphrase another film, it doesn't feel like it can handle the truth.