Say this for “Mission: Cross.” They spent some serious money on this crap.

Flipping cars, explosions, drone shot sequences, legions of black-helmeted commando minions cast, costumed and slaughtered in a James Bond “villain’s lair” finale — that doesn’t come cheap in Hollywood, Bollywood, Nollywood or South Korea.

Writer-director Lee Myung Hoon’s debut feature is an action comedy that, even allowing for humor that doesn’t translate or cross Korean borders, is hard-pressed for laughs and only “funny” enough to undercut the thriller it’s grafted onto.

Yum Jung-ah (“Alienoid”) is the crusty, no-nonsense police captain Kang Mi-Seon, a two-fisted force of nature who always gets her woman and man, often by pummeling them with her taser-equipped “stun knuckles (glove).”

The guys under her command are scared of her. So is her husband in a marriage she narrates her droll contempt for. Park Kang-moo (Hwang Jung-min of “Kill Boksoon”) cooks, cleans, gets her up for breakfast, and when she’s off to work, drives a school bus, taking particular interest in one particular child as he goes about his duties.

He gives massages as well.

The captain’s subordinates call him “Wifey Kang” (in Korean with English subtitles, or dubbed) in contempt, sometimes even in front of the captain. Little do they know…

Her husband has a past. Meeting a woman, Jang Hee-joo (Jeon Hye-jin) from that earlier life inspires more nurturing instincts, and flashbacks. Back in the day they were agents of an intel agency charged with protecting Korea from Russian weapons supplied to nefarious actors at home or abroad. That big mission went wrong, with comrades killed or captured and tortured at the orders of a mysterious General Park.

Now, Jang Hee-joo has resurfaced, attacked by minions of their old foes.

But Captain Kang’s “team” sees them together and starts surveilling them as they try to summon up the courage to tell her “Wifey Kang” is cheating. They imagine Kang-moo’s every meeting from her in the most salacious tones.

When she finds out, will their captain flip out, lose focus on the big pursuit of an underworld figure she’s long had in her sights? Or worse?

“Mission: Cross” takes forever to settle into the middle and late act action beats, with chases, shootouts and twists that play into them. They don’t arrive gracefully, either. The convoluted scandal behind all of this, which ties the stories and the couple-who-don’t-really-know-one-another together, is both Bond-exotic and money-laundering blasé.

The performances are perfunctory, with little heart, heat or whimsy. The picture never looks cheap, but the melodramatic flourishes dumb it down at every turn.

I went in expecting mayhem and action comedy fun, and while there’s a little of the former, there’s little evidence of the latter. One-liners don’t land and the best gag — the lady cop’s stun knuckles — are abandoned far too early to suit me.

If you’ve seen one “Let’s empty out my secret stash of machine guns, Kevlar vests and grenades” for the big finale, you’ve seen them all.

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, torture, gunplay and profanity

Cast: Yum Jung-ah, Hwang Jung-min, Jeon Hye-jin and
Kim Chan-Hyung

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lee Myung Hoon. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44