In secular cinematic terms, “The Oath” is a limp, underfinanced Pre-Columbian “Last of the Mohicans,” an “action adventure” about the lone survivor of a tribe hunted down by his hated rivals, but not before he’s fallen in love with an outcast from the tribe that’s trying to finish the genocide it started.

The characters are kind of colorless. There’s one big swordfight and the “romance” is largely off camera. The not-exactly-an-epic production values — nothing is “built,” with a river, a waterfall, forest and a rock overhang cave the only settings — are still a step or two above the “student film/first film” feel of the entire enterprise.

But “The Oath” isn’t “secular.” Actor (often billed as Darin Southam) turned writer-director-star Darin Scott has conjured up a MesoAmerican thriller built on Mormonism’s foundation myth, with just enough magical thinking thrown in to make everything “historical” presented here play as eye-rolling hokum.

Set about 500 years after the death of Jesus, and roughly 500 years after Jesus appeared to the “lost tribes of Israel” in the Americas, it’s about descendents of the Biblical Joseph who fled Egypt, crossed the Mediterreanean and Atlantic and settled in the New World, only to engage in a blood feud here.

The last of the Nephites, Moroni (Scott) is on the run through the verdant woodlands of North America, hunted by the minions of Aaron, king of the Lamanites. He’s played by Billy Zane in a classic Brigham Young beard, speaking in some sort of pre-Columbian Irish accent.

That Billy Zane. What a cut-up.

Moroni prays in interior monologues as he lays low and finishes inscribing the golden plates alleged to have been the source scriptures for the Book of Mormon. He urges the almighty to “make me mighty in body and soul” so that he won’t have to endure “the slavery of my (fore)fathers,” the dreamcoated Joseph and his Israelites in bondage in Egypt Land.

Widowed Moroni finds his scholarship with those golden plates interrupted when he takes in the injured and cast-out concubine Bathsheeba (Nora Dale) from the evil Aaron’s “court.”

Once they get past her “You’re boring, all of your talking” and his raised-eyebrow over what “concubine to the king” entails, they’re destined to fall in love.

But the rules of drama are that this is the perfect moment for ace trackers, including Bathsheeba’s sister (Karina Lombard) and Aaron’s head henchman (Eugene Brave Rock) to find them.

The film’s Mormonism origin story is back-engineered to get us from the words of the descendant of one Joseph to the hands of a New American Joseph, Joseph Smith, via those inscribed plate/pages of gold Smith claimed to have found buried in upstate New York in 1823.

I first encountered the rough parameters of this tale as a child, in handed-down Mormon comics from a true-believer uncle. As a childhood fan of the National Geographic TV archeology and paleontology specials and a lover of history, the yarn struck me as eye-rolling “history,” and a dim, dull fantasy not remotely inventive enough to be on a par with the Marvel comics I was reading and outgrew by my early teens.

Darin Scott as he now bills himself isn’t able to wring anything more convincing out of this scenario on film. It’s a production that conspicously avoids any depiction of “lost tribes” as advanced civilizations. No “cities,” no buildings for the king and his “court.” About all we see here that might have made it into the archeological record — had any of this really happened — are steel swords and bronze breastplates.

But this isn’t about archeology. Mormonism’s founding text and version of American pre-history has been debunked at the highest, most scientific and official levels. No “Lost Tribes of Israel” voyaged 5000 miles to the Western Hemisphere.

Given that provable fact, and allowing that few religions could pass a rigorous fact-based dig into their origins, “Oath” is a story that needs to at least be compelling enough to be the backbone of belief.

“The Oath” isn’t anywhere near compelling, convincing or even interesting enough to make that sale. The movie’s lifeless and generic, and does nothing to shake the sense that the theology behind it is probably balderdash.

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: Darin Scott, Nora Dale, Karina Lombard, Eugene Brave Rock and Billy Zane.

Credits: Directed by Darin Scott, scripted by Darin and Michelle Scott, based on The Book of Mormon. A Freestyle Media release.

Running time: 1:44