A serial killer is on the loose, murdering “foreign workers” in Taiwan. Let’s put our best detective on the case! You know, the one we meet just as she’s attempting to commit suicide in the same car where her partner/lover pulled the trigger on himself.

“The Abandoned” is a “by the book” police procedural serial killer thriller. The “book” in this case means no genre trope can be passed by, no melodramatic flourish left out.

A couple of decent twists, some good performances and two grimly realistic third-act fights recommend this new film from the director of “Double Date,” Ying-Ting Tseng. Everything else? Tried and true and kind of worn out.

Janine Chun-Ning, no newcomer to the genre herself (cop web and TV series, etc.) is Det. Wue Jie, still wracked by grief, still living in the car where her beloved killed himself a year before. She’s just about to put a second hole in the roof via a bullet through her chin when she’s interrupted by a woman being chased by hooligans.

Hunting along the waterfront for them, she finds a body. By the time the coroner gets hold of the corpse, with signs of ritualistic murder, she’s found her purpose. She will find out who this woman was — fingerprints have been removed — and track down her murderer.

Her gruff boss (veteran character actor Wei-min Chen) tells her “All I ask is for you to be OK.” Oh, and that she take the perky rookie (Chloe Xiang) along and show her how to investigate a murder before accepting a transfer to some less stressful department.

They’ll need to dig into Taiwan’s “foreign worker” underworld — with its human trafficking, fake IDs, “dissapearances” and the racism that drives the indifference such cases invite. They’ll need to hurry, because flash-forwards in the opening scene have shown us a woman tied up in an underground lair, awaiting her murder, and that what we’re watching unfold begins “five days earlier.”

We also meet Lin You-sheng (Ethan Juan), a grumpy grocer who plays a part in all these Thai, Vietnamese and Filipino “foreign workers” slipping into the country. Lin You-Sheng fell for a Thai woman he helped, who dumped him when he wouldn’t get serious.

When her sister (Sajee Apiwong) shows up, telling him his ex has “gone missing,” we put things together before he does.

Waree was her name. She’s already dead. And thanks to his ties to her and to that underworld, we have our Prime Suspect.

There’s interesting detail in the police work and the modus operandi of those helping these workers get in and go underground. But much of what we’re treated to is straight-up melodrama.

Want to test how much the ex-lover Lin is upset by Waroo’s murder? Get a cop to go undercover at the station, pretend to be a handcuffed suspect, and taunt the grieving man with a racist “Thais are dirty…you’ll catch a disease” tirade to see if it sets him off.

Some of the trickier parts of the case — IDing the body, for instance — are dispensed with via anonymous phone calls. That’s lazy. We meet the killer early on, hear explanations of such a mass murderer’s “motivations,” but see little of that.

All the fake names and peripheral characters are added to the mix just to throw the viewer off the scent of a seriously formulaic story — suicidal cop/irritable boss/rookie partner who has to prove herself, all chasing a serial killer.

“They say the corpse chooses the cop” sounds like a line from a half dozen Hollywood films and many a TV police procedural episode.

Twenty-four minutes were cut from this thriller — which plays out in Mandarin, Thai and Min Nan with English subtitles for Netflix — thank goodness.

It’s solid enough, with a little suspense in the third act. But the main thing “The Abandoned” accomplishes is showing that police picture tropes translate to most any language, and translated or not, it’s very hard for one to manage more than a surprise or two in between the cliches.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence

Cast: Janine Chun-Ning Chang, Ethan Juan, Chloe Xiang, Wei-min Chen and Sajee Apiwong

Credits: Directed by Ying-Ting Tseng, scripted by Pin Chun Lin, Yi-Chen Yang and Ying-Ting Tseng A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44