It’s great that after all his years before the camera, Aussie actor Eric Bana is finally in a franchise that plays to his considerable strengths as an actor and a screen “presence.”

“Force of Nature” is a sequel to “The Dry,” a top knotch mystery thriller from a couple of years back set in the Outback. Bana reprises his role as Federal Detective Aaron Falk for a jungle Australia story of women lost in the rainforests of Giralang in this latest Jane Harper novel to be made into a movie.

As in “The Dry,” which took the character to his hometown during a drought to solve a crime, Falk has a past connection to this place — a childhood trauma. As in that film, there is a crime to unravel in classic mystery novel adaptation fashion, a few hoary tropes included.

And as in that film, we see Australia at its most tourist brochure-striking — scenic forests, clouds of bats, lovely waterfalls, and a “raging” river for somebody to fall in while trying to retrieve a map that will get her and her “Executive Adventures” retreat group out of the woods and out of a jam.

Falk and partner Carmen (Jacqueline McKenzie) show up after four women come out of the woods, wet, lost and in one case — spider-bitten. But one of their “team building exercise” participants did not get out.

Alice (Anna Torv), we learn, wasn’t popular. She was high up in the Bailey Tennants development (just guessing) firm, an ill-tempered bully. She might be romantically involved with the company founder (Richard Roxbourgh). Alice’s boss and wife of the founder Jill (Deborra Lee-Furness) might have known about it. Lauren (Robin McLeavy), the one backpacker with “bush skills,” has “history with Alice. And sisters Beth and Bree (Sisi Strong and Lucy Ansell) had their issues with her as well.

“Alice didn’t like me, and she never pretended to hide it.”

Even Falk wasn’t all that crazy about Alice. But he had to deal with her. She was his “inside source” at Bailey Tennants, which Falk and his partner were investigating for financial crimes. That’s why they’re there to “assist” with the search. Strange coincidence, their source being the only one to not make it out of the woods.

Falk knows this remote place, with its lovely Mirror Falls, is forbidding, where “one small mistake could change everything.” He knows it because of something that happened during his childhood.

So as he and Carmen question the women, and almost question Bailey himself, we see not just the flashbacks of that ill-fated hike for “problem employees,” and the melodramatic chain of events that put them all in peril, we glimpse young Aaron’s (Archie Thomson) experience there with his parents (Ash Ricardo and Jeremy Lindsay Taylor) decades before.

The script throws in a storm, a complication that’s treated as an afterthought. Another complication is that the woods were long ago the haunt of an infamous Aussie serial killer. The Robert Connolly film — he did Bana’s “The Dry” and “Blueback” — is a bit by-the-numbers in terms of those complications and the nature of the withheld details later revealed in the many interrogations.

“That’s why I wasn’t surprised when she lied to us,” lines like that, abound.

At one point, Falk gathers the women in the lobby lounge in front of a resort hotel fireplace for a group questioning to “Reveal what REALLY happened,” a gimmick straight out of Agatha Christie and all who would film her books or imitate them.

But through it all, Bana is a brooding, soulful presence, a man who takes this situation seriously, who is more interested in saving his source’s life than whatever information she can provide their investigation, someone who doesn’t let the local cops’ mission creep — Hey, we could wrap up more of this serial killer story with this “search!” — go unchallenged.

“Force of Nature” is more solid and perfunctory than the even more exotic and atmospheric “The Dry.” But the players, the situations and the twists, which are pretty good, recommend it.

And Bana as Aaron Falk? Good on ya, mate. Hang on to this franchise as long as they’ll let you.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Eric Bana, Anna Torv, Lucy Ansell, Deborra Lee-Furness, Robin McLeavy, Sisi Strong, Jacqueline McKenzie and Richard Roxbourgh

Credits: Scripted and directed by Robert Connolly, based on a novel by Jane Harper. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:52