“Justice” is a solid if somewhat unsatisfying slow-burn thriller from Poland, a drama set shortly after the country shed Soviet era Russian dominatation.

It’s about a heist that went wrong, the pitiless murders that took place when that happened and the pitiless former totalitarian government investigator brought back to “solve” the crime and deliver “Justice,” old school or otherwise.

Olaf Lubaszenko of Kieslowki’s “A Short Film About Love” stars as Tadeusz Gadacz, an aging outcast from the Communist regime, an ace detective whose “methods” don’t work in a civil rights-treasuring democracy. He’s still got the Mercedes his prior work earned him. But these days, the loner scrapes by making garden gnomes.

A prosecutor (Magdalena Boczarska) from the justice ministry brings him back. She and her boss, the justice minister (Miroslaw Haniszewski) remember the man’s brutish methods. But two weeks of such rough trade might solve a bank robbery that went wrong and got several people — most of them women clerks — killed.

Gadacz is called in so quickly that the crime scene is still active. He can poke around the bodies and note details and get a handle on the awful ways it all went down. He can check behind the cops still on the job and turn up one “person of interest” who turns out to be a body that his replacements have missed.

“I recognize when someone has made a mistake and there’s no time for them to undo it,” he muses (in Polish, or dubbed into English).

With the former protege he still nicknames “Pocket” (Wiktoria Gorodecka) Gadacz will quickly settle on a theory, suspects and a means of pinning the crime on them. Surveillance, interrogation and shoe leather work will be involved.

Here’s what’s not particularly satisfying about this version of “Justice.”

There’s no urgency, and the stakes seem low. Gadacz hardly harbors any hope that he’ll be allowed to return to the force. The “two weeks” he’s allowed to put this case to beg is charted with “Day One” through “Day Twelve” and beyond with intertitles is meaningless and arbitrary, and seems leisurely.

Gadacz and we “know” who did it. Flashbacks and shifts in point of view only confirm that. There’s no cliched “pressure from above” to solve this case. After all, they basically brought him in before the bodies were moved. He’s their first resort, not their last.

Director Michal Gazda and screenwriter Bartosz Staszczyszyn immerse us in a place and a time, reminding us of the ugliness of the communist past and the unjust, unsettling adjustment to “capitalism,” when the country is asked to celebrate a bank merger as something new and patriotic, heedless of the human cost.

But they’ve made a “ticking clock thriller” and ignored the damned clock. They give away the killers, making their movie focus only on the ways a cunning and ruthless detective traps and coerces them to deliver his idea of “justice.” That’s interesting only in the melodramatic hokum implicit in that approach — the corny, old-fashioned and unrealistic attack of “conscience.”

“I’ve got to CONFESS!”

The players are in sharp form, with screen veteran Lubaszenko anchoring the film in world weariness, and Jedrzej Hycnar suggesting sinister grievances and psychoses that justify his “smart” villain’s choices, no matter how ruthless.

And the narrative carries you along, even if it takes its sweet time, even if there’s not a lot of mystery about it as it does.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence

Cast: Olaf Lubaszenko, Wiktoria Gorodecka, Jedrzej Hycnar and Magdalena Boczarska

Credits: Directed by Michal Gazda, scripted by
Bartosz Staszczyszyn, A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55