“Land of Bad” is a solid-enough B-movie combat thriller with the cast and production values of an A-picture.

It’s got Oscar winner Russell Crowe as an Air Force drone pilot guiding commandos played by Luke and Liam Hemsworth, Milo Ventimiglia and Ricky Whittle out of a jungle jam — a special ops “extraction” that goes wrong.

There’s something like a “remote control/video game warfare” vs. the “barbaric” intimacy of hand to band combat debate in this William Eubank actioner, as we see men tortured and fighting to the death as a drone pilot shops for “artisinal” cheeses and the like in an upscale market in Las Vegas after he clocks out.

But as Avenue Pictures has gotten into the Russ business — Crowe’s “Sleeping Dogs” is coming up later this spring — they indulge their no-longer-fighting-trim star in ways that hobble the picture at times, especially in the anti-climaxes that follow the finale.

Four commandos led by Lt. Sugar (Ventimiglia of TV’s “This is Us”) are sent into Southeast Asia to extract a kidnapped CIA asset. Three, played by Ventimiglia, Luke Hemsworth and Whittle, are hardened veterans. But “the kid,” Kinney (Liam Hemsworth) is a green Air Force specialist who isn’t HALO qualified, brought along as the JTAC, the guy who communicates with the drone crew.

Crowe is the Reaper pilot aptly-nicknamed “Reaper,” a long-in-the-tooth, couch-potato-bod captain whose real name, we can see on the Air Force tunic he wears over his shorts and Hawaian shirt, is “E. Grimm.”

Don’t fear “The Grimm Reaper,” you say? Wait until you get him on the radio.

“I am your eyes in the sky and bringer of doom,” he growls.

And when the mission goes wrong and the odds against them rise, all the never-miss-sniping in the world (gotta love combat film fantasies) won’t save our quartet. Mr. Surgical Strike (a higher tech fantasy), sitting in a chair in an air conditioned room at a Vegas Air Force base with a hula skirted dashboard doll for luck and a Ping golf glove on his trigger hand, just might.

The fights are furious and the explosions –staged in the jungles of Queensland, Australia, with power line towers plainly visible in the distance and our “super villain’s lair” “compound” a hydro-electric dam and its surroundings — are epic.

Our commandos are convincingly grizzled, and Hemsworth the Younger makes his character properly frazzled and out of his depth.

But director Eubank (“The Signal,””Underwater”) knows where the real money is, and the camera is never far from Crowe, who isn’t so much playing a character as a collection of “traits,” signifiers and accessories.

His clothes merit explanation, as does his age if not his gone-to-seed physique. Reaper is on-the-spectrum nerdy about his organized coffee pods, “my chair,” the phoneline that needs to be kept open in case his pregnant fourth wife (!?) calls — who is, he reminds us and his JTAC in the field, a vegan.

“How do you know when someone’s a vegan?” We give up. “They will TELL you.”

Crowe doesn’t hijack the film, because as a combat saga it crosses from predictably dire to amusingly far-fetched. Suffice it to say that in this war Western, “the cavalry” is always coming, be it a Hellfire missle fired from a drone, an evac chopper or other hardware or a character you underestimate or otherwise lose track of.

But Crowe’s swagger and showboating here is a double-edged sword, and not really the icing on the cake which he seems to believe it is.

Rating: R, violence and lots of it, profanity

Cast: Russell Crowe, Liam Hemsworth, Milo Ventimiglia, Chika Ikogwe, Ricky Whittle, Luke Hemsworth and Robert Rabiah.

Credits: Directed by William Eubank, scripted by William Eubank and David Frigerio. An Avenue release.

Running time: 1:50