Veteran character actor Louis Mandylor and a bunch of similarly-seasoned friends took off for Thailand to play at war in “3 Days in Malay,” an almost comically ahistorical, geographically-and-everything else inept version of the epic Guadalcanal Campaign.

A hellish struggle to the death in superheated, bug-infested jungle where a mere tent could be considered a luxury is depicted as a tedious string of leisurely reunion scenes between guys too old to be mere grunts, too facially-groomed to be “GI” “squared away” in accomodations too elaborate and modern to pass for Quonset hut barracks back in the day.

The Army is integrated years before Harry Truman got around to doing that. There are nurses and WACs present in the perilous, under-supplied early weeks of this first Allied offensive against the Japanese. The uniforms often don’t look right, and the same can be said for a lot of the ordnance.

So “suspending disbelief” becomes a bit of a challenge. And I say “almost comically” because I don’t want to encourage any “catch the anachronisms” drinking games among viewers.

Mandylor, a familiar face since “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” directed and stars as John Caputo, an ex-boxer, ex-Marine brought in with reinforcements for the campaign, which began in August of 1942 and raged on for six months. The “3 Days” depicted here take place in October.

There’s a love-hate reunion with a guy from “the old neighborhood” (Cowboy Cerrone), a nurse and a WAC to flirt with, and a bearded “West Point’s finest” Sgt. (?) played by Peter Dobson doing a lot of yelling at superior officers, including a general, demanding that he let him “do what we do” because “This is what we do!”

There are just enough scenes from the Japanese point of view to allow the viewer to ponder the uniforms and enjoy the phonetically-parsed Japanese by Thai extras.

Well, everybody knows “BANZAI!”

All those depicted look scrubbed, dry-cleaned and pressed and generally unhurried and not all that worried about another attempt to overrun the unnamed (Henderson Field) and unseen airstrip the enemy covets.

The combat scenes have some exciting bladework and martial arts action, to go along with digitally-augmented prop machine guns and the like. Strafing by digitally-animated aircraft is included.

But it all looks…wrong.

Hollywood rushed out “Guadalcanal Diary” in the middle of the war, and couldn’t be expected to get the flora, fauna and hellish nature of the struggle to look right. Terrence Malick went to Guadalcanal itself to film James Jone’s account of the campaign for “The Thin Red Line” in ’98.

“3 Days in Malay” is so disconnected from “realism” that I cannot find any reference to anything “Malay” in the Solomon Islands or WWII related, any more than I confirm that there’s any way WACs would have been on an island the Navy was repeatedly cut-off from supplying and reinforcing, especially in the fraught earliest weeks of the battle.

There’s nothing wrong with taking a stab at making a B-movie combat film set on Saipan or Guadalcanal. But the fact that almost that entire generation of survivors has died out is no excuse for being this cavalier and sloppy with historical basics and simple military fundamentals. Hiring an advisor to help you miss the obvious blunders, and tell your 40-to-50something cast members to “shave that elaborate beard/mustache,” would seem a must, not an inulgence.

If you can’t afford a few tents and your cast can’t be bothered to leave the golf club locker room (what the primary set looks like) setting to trek into real damp and leafy jungles, why bother?

Rating: R, graphic violence, profanity, drinking, smoking

Cast: Louis Mandylor, Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, Peter Dobson, Kelly Lynn Reiter, Kelly B. Jones, Randall J. Bacon and Bear Jackson

Credits: Directed by Louis Mandylor, scripted by Brandon Slagle. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:39