That broken record that hits the turntable almost every time I have to review a thriller is skipping again, this time all the way through “The Engineer.”

“PACING,” skip. “PACING,” skip.

This inspired by “true events” picture is about the hunt for the most notorious Palestinian bomb-builder of the mid-90s, the cunning killer nicknamed “The Engineer.” He was the guy who built the vest-bombs that Hamas suicide-bombers wore onto buses and into Israel’s public places, killing scores and rattling the state that they saw as occupiers/tormenters, who took their land and created their own ethnic quasi-theocracy out of it.

Emile Hirsch leads a cast that saunters through this national crisis and frantic manhunt — agents taking a break for card games and the like — while Israel was being torn apart.

The film takes place in 1995, and “Oslo Accords” peace efforts by Israel’s leadership, the Palestinian Authority and U.S. President Bill Clinton were battered by the spiral of violence and reprisals, which climaxed when an Israeli right winger murdered Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

It’s an important piece of recent history undermined in the telling by slack pacing and a film agenda that seems intent on changing the subject re: Israel today, an apartheidist state morphing into authoritarianism.

Hirsch plays Etan, an American-born Israeli Jew suspended from intelligence work — Mossad and Shin Bet are the two agencies involved — for almost murdering a prisoner in custody. His boss (played by Danny A. Abeckaser, who also directed) summons him back with the “I need you, Israel needs you” speech.

There’s nothing for it but to try and talk the wife into taking their son to Marseilles because “nowhere is safe here,” and to work contacts and start rounding up people who know who this Yahya Ayyash (Adam Haloon), aka “The Engineer” is and where he might be hiding, building bombs and training recruits.

“The streets are getting covered in body parts and we’re sitting on our hands!” Etan protests.

But at least Mossad and Shin Bet are working together. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a wild card in the deck.

Robert Davi plays a fictional U.S. senator who loses a daughter in the film’s opening scene bus-bombing, so he hires his own ex-Mossad “friend” (Angel Bononni) to track down that “Engineer” because “I wanna look him in the eye and I want to shoot him myself.” Classic Robert Davi line.

Perhaps that fictional part of the story was inspired by this true one.

So the Israelis have taken any pretext of “due process” gloves off to catch or kill this killer. And now an American has hired a guy who assembles his own ex-Mossad and IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) team to shoot their way through Gaza without worrying about laws or optics.

That conflict isn’t actually a “conflict” here, and the blind alleys and dead ends in the hunt aren’t all that novel. The interrogations aren’t written, blocked, filmed or edited to give the film that “Munich/Zero Dark Thirty” rising suspense.

All involved could still have made this work by amping up their intensity, even as the film does a decent job of using news montages of each fresh horror to remind us of the stakes.

In this performance, Hirsch isn’t a particularly compelling, convincing or emotionally-committed presence to build this film around. The villain is barely sketched in, as if they lost their nerve at portraying Ayyash as a “villain.”

And none of that lets one forget the film’s unsavory pro-torture, pro-assassination, Israel-as-victim-again/change the-subject-from-Dictator-Bibi agenda.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Emile Hirsch, Adam Haloon, Angel Bonanni, Tsahi Halevi, Yarden Toussia-Cohen, Danny A. Abeckaser and Robert Davi

Credits: Directed by Danny A. Abeckaser, scripted by Kosta Kondilopoulos. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:32