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The stakes could not have been higher. The bloodiest war in history had just been brought to an end, and not all the “monsters” who launched it and conceived and carried out the worst genocide in human history had been killed or killed themselves.

A show trial in the city where their Big Lie and rabble rousing began, forcing the perpetrators to “tell the world what they did” could avoid letting the murderous leaders become martyrs for future generations in Germany, Japan and other places fascism could pop back up. But losing such cases could show the Allies “defeated by the very men we’ve just beaten” and all but invite a twisted revival of the horrors just visited upon the world.

The stakes aren’t as high for any movie about “Nuremberg,” but with fascism rearing its ugly head at home and abroad, you kind of need this latest take on the trial of the last century to resonate, deliver a message and get it right. And the best veteran producer turned writer-director James Vanderbilt could manage is a movie that saves its message for the finale, and swings and misses at showing us how that message was researched and formulated.

Oscar winners Russell Crowe and Rami Malek square off as Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second in command, and the American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley sent to question him, examine him and keep him from killing himself before going to trial.

Göring is cocksure and grandiose from the moment he surrenders, stopping his tricked-out Mercedes limo and giving himself up to U.S. troops. Kelley is a glib opportunist who revels at the book he’s sure he’s just had dropped at his feet, joking about the work he is assigned and calling himself a “shrink” twenty years before the term came to be used for psychotherapists.

Kelley isn’t “played” by Göring, but he lets himself be charmed by the man who signed off on concentration camps and SS directives to enslave and slaughter those in them. The cat and mouse game of their “chats” can be flippant and funny as the trained therapist draws a bead on his quarry and the canny World War I flying ace, art connisseur, art thief and pompous member of the lesser nobility relishes the chanceto spin the doctor’s expectations and to have “as you say, my day in court.”

The narrative has our joking and shallow mental health professional journey to a grim appreciation of just what went on in those camps and the role his various “patients” from the heirarchy played in it. He reports to military prison warden Col. Andrus (John Slattery) and even to prosecutor Jackson (Michael Shannon) himself, with both of them wanting inside dope on the defense strategy and wondering about Kelley’s loyalties and his seriousness — book deal or not — as Kelley befriends not just Göring but his family.

And we see the pompous fat man who likes his uniforms and medals plot his manuevers to “escape the hangman’s noose” only to have his culpability laid bare in open court, with all the world watching and listening.

Shannon is Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, assigned to prosecute the trials of the leaders of the Third Reich and surviving architects of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Richard E. Grant plays one of his British counterparts, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe.

The film’s great gift to this piece of much-filmed history is demythologizing Jackson, a figure the script and Shannon portray as well-intentioned, hard-nosed and out of his depth in attempting to try charismatic sociopaths that most of the world would rather had been rounded up and shot.

Jackson lobbying a Nazi-appeaser tainted Pope Pius XII is a scene that crackles. Too many others don’t. Leo Woodall plays a Jewish German-American GI/translator whose personal connection to crimes detailed in court lands flat. And Kelley’s epiphany about what Hannah Arendt would label “the banality of evil,” just ordinary lumps willing to commit and condone heinous acts of barbarism, is misplaced until the tacked-on finale, after he’s written that book.

There’s also a commendable effort to remember the broad scale of the genocide — mass murder of Slavs, Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, leftists and POWs as well as Europe’s Jews — which is the way the world saw it then, as “concentration camps” were finally exposed as “slave labor camps” and even “death camps.”

The structure of the script delivers the trial scenes only after two not-quite-tedious hours of preliminaries. And even at a two and a half-hour run time, Kelley’s “realization” and outrage plays as so abrupt one can’t help but roll the eyes at the stumbling attempts at humor to show us the starting point of Kelley’s journey into this nightmare, which will make him serious in a flash.

Vanderbilt scripted and directed the similarly tone-death Robert Redford journalism lecture “Truth,” and one really wishes he’d stuck to rounding up financing for Fincher’s “Zodiac” and the “Scream” reboots. The guy who wrote a decades-later “Independence Day” sequel shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near material this serious.

Didn’t his “shrink” warn him?

Rating: PG-13, horrific concentration camp images, suicide, profanity

Cast: Russell Crowe, Rami Malek, John Slattery, Leo Woodall, Richard E. Grant and Michael Shannon.

Credits: Scripted and directed by James Vanderbilt, based on a book by Jack El-Hai. A Sony Pictures Classics/Walden Media release.

Running time: 2:28