“Marlowe” is a vamp, a bunch of 60somethings playacting hardboiled 40somethings. I’m OK with that, for obvious reasons.

The light isn’t right. This is the first filmed-version of Raymond Chandler’s famed LA gumshoe shot in Barcelona and Dublin, which explains that.

Characters don’t talk like real people, but the way we wish real people talked — flinty, florid fulminations over “assignations” with “femme fatales,” missing persons, gangsters, cops and others all up and down the spectrum of corruption.

“I’m more harmless than I look.”

“I’m sorry that it was ultimately uninteresting to talk to you.”

“When you’re getting to be an old man, it’s OK to get out alive.”

And for once, Philip Marlowe is forced to consider the first person to have that famous surname, the playwright who scribbled “Dr. Faustus.”

“Why this is hell, nor am I out of it,” an Angelino recites upon meeting “the big man.”

“That was his one good line,” Liam Neeson’s Marlowe growls in recognition.

I’d call this thriller — directed by Neil Jordan, who won an Oscar for writing “The Crying Game,” and scripted by William Monahan, who won his for “The Departed”– a fun, bad movie. But it’s not bad, just arch and over the top and all attitude and genre tropes and cliches.

And if you can’t find pleasure in seeing how tickled Oscar winner Jessica Lange is to be swapping pithy, punchy lines with an actor worthy of her stature, of watching grizzled Colm Meaney pass on old cop’s advice to a high-mileage private dick, if you can’t bask in the juicy tete a tetes Neeson shares with Danny Huston, Ian Hart and Alan Cumming, perhaps there’s a movie about a superhero the size of an ant that may be more your speed.

Diane Kruger plays the femme fatale who wants to know “How private, exactly, are your investigations, Mr. Marlowe?”

Claire Cavendish’s lover (François Arnaud) is supposedly dead, but she’s not convinced.

She’d rather her husband and her retired screen siren mother (Lange) not know about this digging around. Cop pals Hart and Meaney aren’t keen on this “investigation.” The “exclusive club” manager (Huston) who supposedly witnessed the death is more interested in obfuscation and World War I stories about how corpses don’t phase guys like himself and Marlowe.

“You’re my age. Perhaps you were there. Perhaps you know how it was and therefor is.“

Cumming is the mob boss whose gift of the gab and quoting of the writer’s Bible, Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style,” rubs off on his bodyguard/driver (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje).

“I’m a generic name, an eponymous ‘trademark!'”

“Marlowe” is set in 1939-40, with “I’ll Be Seeing You” seemingly on every Victrola and radio. It takes place for on “the periphery” of the movie business, and dips into the drug trade in a world of Irish “Colleens” of the screen, and “mick” cops, Mexicans on the outside starting to look in, sex workers and secrets, which every mystery thrives on.

The mystery isn’t all that engrossing, and the picture devolves into some CYA third act over-explaining to compensate for that. It can be a bit much, and more often than not. So OK, maybe it is a bad picture that’s still fun.

But it’d be hard to imagine this cast, with Neeson reuniting with his “Michael Collins” director and his “Kingdom of Heaven” screenwriter, not giving something resembling fair value.

The ambition alone is a real step up for Neeson, still making two-fisted action pictures, but this time in a literary-minded period piece package.

With “pearls before swine” quips and banter about Christopher Marlowe’s alleged authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, if this “Marlowe” isn’t Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep/Farewell My Lovely” hero, he’ll do until some younger fellow fit to fill his gumshoes comes along.

Rating: R for language, violent content, some sexual material and brief drug use

Cast: Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange, Danny Huston, Alan Cumming, Daniela Melchior, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Ian Hart and Colm Meaney.

Credits: Directed by Neil Jordan, scripted by William Monahan, adapted from the novel by John Banville, based on Raymond Chandler’s character, Philip Marlowe. An Open Road release.

Running time: 1:49