“Bogota: City of the Lost” is an underworld “how criminals crime” procedural with an exotic setting and fish-out-of-water characters but no pace or narrative drive worthy of its novelty.

A tale that is voice-over-narrated to death by our smuggler-on-the-rise, it’s like a low stakes, myopic “Blow,” where the goals are modest and dull and somewhat heartless.

Plenty of Westerns have gotten by on telling a lawless tale in a lawless place with nothing but male protagonists. Korean ex-pats smuggling Korea lingerie and Korean down parkas into ’90s and early 2000s Colombia? By the standards of that then-blighted country, these guys are strictly small-time.

Motorbike armed robberies targeting newcomers are just the periphery of a crimescape cursed with cartels and corruption, but at least not “broke” like the Korea people like the Song family have fled.

Dad (Kim Jong Soo) has an old Army buddy from his Vietnam War service he has to rely on when he can’t get his family from Korea to the United States.

Sgt. Park (Kwon Hae Hyo) has set himself up as a smuggling kingpin, bribing the bribable, price-cutting the competition. He’s spun his own self-made myth about his place in Bogota as well. But he knows the locals — Korean and Colombian — still call him “Cuca,” short for “Cucuracha” (“cockroach).

Teenaged Song Kook-hee (Song Joong-ki) may have a name that Colombians and Koreans laugh at as sounding like “cookie” (or “kooky”). But as he starts as a delivery boy, showing his mettle as a driver of the trucks led by Sgt. Park’s top lieutenant (Lee Hee-joon) through roadblocks, bribes and “rebel” hijackings, he finds his loyalties divided.

Jeon Su Yeong sees through Sgt. Park’s bluster and dreams of setting up shop on his own. With Colombian smugglers and Colombian officials trying to limit the Korean impact on their economy, and with paranoid Park always keeping an ear open for betrayals, this seems like a long shot.

Perhaps the young driver has the instincts to elbow his way to the top, to the “sixth level” of Buddhism the mobsters speak of as their ultimate goal — comfort, power and happiness.

Voice-over narration explains the smuggling pipeline. Years pass — the film begins with the Korean Financial Crisis of 1997 — and we see, and hear narration, that shows us how Kook-hee devolves from victim to fellow predator in “a country where nothing goes well, but nothing is impossible.”

Director and co-writer Seong-je Kim leans on that laziest of crutches — voice-over — like a filmmaker certain he’s telling a “saga” despite the myopic community depicted here and their pitiful risk-reward ratio.

The violence that beefs up the third act is nothing special, but we do learn how Kook-hee finally masters the threat of motorcycle drive-by robberies or shootings. That “solution” is as dull as too much of what has proceded it.

Even the most charismatic characters — and Kook-hee isn’t that — need cool clashes, crisp stand-offs and the like to register. Song Joong-ki does what he can, but all his narration detracts from the striking setting and dangers of crossing the wrong people in Colombia at its most violent.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse

Cast: Song Joong-ki, Kwon Hae-hyo, Lee Hee-joon and
Kim Jong Soo

Credits: Directed by
Seong-je Kim, scripted by Seong-je Kim and Hwang Seong-gu. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48