“The Channel” is a super-violent cops-and-robbers shoot-em-up set in the Irish Channel neighborhood of New Orleans.

It’s built around “Heat” scaled shootouts between Tac’d to the max ex-military bank robbers, and New Orleans PD, SWAT and an FBI bank robbery unit.

The picture benefits from its simplicity — robbers, bloodied and hunted and on the run — and its Big Easy setting. A big chunk of the budget went to armanent and bullet-riddled mayhem, with getaway cars and cop cruisers, cops and robbers riddled with bullets in several set-piece shootouts eating up much of the film’s running time.

It’s not the most logical thriller, with suggestions of real world law enforcement behavior — a furious need for revenge — jumbled up with a plot that contrives to judge one cop killer more harshly than others, and old fashioned scenes of faceless men in blue displaying heedless bravery in the face of overwhelming firepower, something the news — and New Orleans PD’s MO — -doesn’t validate.

But it’s not terrible, with a couple of decent performances and veteran B-movie director William Kaufman (“Sinners and Saints,” “The Hit List,” “Jarhead” and “The Marine” sequels) giving us competently-staged action and dialogue — he co-wrote the script — that leans into hard-boiled.

“Catch’em? This is NEW ORLEANS. We’re gonna BURY’em.”

A father (Clayne Crawford of TV’s “Lethal Weapon”) hands his baby girl off to a sitter and takes off for a day of work. That means gearing up and masking up with five ex-military goons, plus a driver, to knock-off a local bank.

The guy in charge, Mick (veteran heavy Max Martini)? He gives his personality away in a long, racist joke from his time in Iraq on the drive over, and his psychosis in the way he beats and tortures the bank manager AFTER the guy has surrendered the vault key.

It turns out, Mick and Jamie, our father-figure, are brothers. They will be referred to as “The Mean One” and “The Smart One” when others speak of the two ex-Marines on this long day turned into night.

The robbery goes just well enough for them to be shocked when they’re ambushed in the parking lot. A LONG shoot-out ensues, half a dozen cops die, as do half of the villains. The survivors are on the run, one of them bleeding-out, with even their underworld connections forsaking them in their hour of need.

“Too much blood on” their stolen loot. “BLUE blood.”

But there is no situation that Mick isn’t willing to beat or murder their way into mastering. Gangsters and cops get it in equal measure, with loyal Jamie ever-more-appalled, yet still pulling the trigger to cover whatever throwdown his brother’s gotten them into this time.

His baby has a mother, and Ava (Juliene Joyner) is begging him to flee and cussing out Mick — to his face — when his brother doesn’t run.

Nicoye Banks plays the FBI agent leading the hunt for men he IDs as “vets with trigger time in the sandbox.” Jaren Mitchell plays the one local underworld figure the robbers figure they can deal with. But can they?

The performances are mostly on-the-mark, with Martini, Joyner, Banks and Mitchell standing out, and other players impressing in a scene or two as a snitch, a fence, an ex-military medic, etc.

The shootouts are staged with more efficiency than flair, and considering the gunstore-emptying expenditure of ammo, even “efficiency” is a stretch. Every now and then you see law enforcement holding semi-automatic weapons in ways we don’t usually see on a set with a military or police consultant present.

“The Channel” limits its “New Orleans moments” to a hasty bit of street life that passes by, mid-escape, and a scene on a street car. Shorter shootouts and more of that local color wouldn’t have been a bad thing.

Making more of the “revenge” nature of the pursuit and less of the “die like a warrior” messaging of the bad guys would have given the picture some needed edge. And that might have saved “The Channel” from a head-slappingly stupid finale that simply beggars belief.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Clayne Crawford, Max Martini, Juliene Joyner, Nicoye Banks, Todd Jenkins and Jaren Mitchell.

Credits: Directed by William Kaufman, scripted by William Kaufman and Paul Reichelt. A Brainstorm Media release.

Running time: 1:40