LOL, right?

No agent’s going to get fired for getting her or his client Apple money to make a movie directed by the guy who filmed “Doctor Strange” and “Black Phone.”

But oy. This script. These characters. This dialogue. This setting.

I mean, Miles Teller I get. It’s a LONG time since “Whiplash.” But Anya Taylor-Joy?

“The Gorge” starts out with a certain existential promise in the premise, and then proceeds to cute, glib, explain and EXPLAIN its way out of anything remotely interesting or promising.

To say this goes “generic” in a hot hurry would be an understatement.

Two crack sharpshooters — one a Lithuanian favorite of the Russian kleptocracy (ATJ), the other an ex-Marine (Teller) and sometime “contractor — find themselves hired and assigned to guard this gorge.

It’s a long river valley filled with fog and mystery and darkness. Two towers stand guard over it, along with mines, sensors, automatic sensor-guided machine guns and “cloakers” who hide its existence from the outside world.

The snipers on duty on the east and west rims are cut off from each other and the outside world. Their shift is one year long, four seasons of making certain that whatever’s in this unidentified gasp in the landscape cannot get out.

The Marine is talked into the job by a “high level spook” (Sigourney Weaver) who is awfully vague about what this is all about. The shooter (Sope Dirisu) the Marine replaces thinks this is “the door to hell” and they’re here to “stand on guard at the gate.”

Like a lot of sci fi and horror, that summons up memories of one of the greatest “Twilight Zone” episodes (the Urtext of modern horror, fantasy etc.), “The Howling Man.” But let’s just say that what all this might be about is a lot more mundane and just as far-fetched as that.

The film lapses into “cute” the minute the two shooters realize they’re members of the opposite sex. Their “meet cute” comes through the scope of a rifle.

She’s pale and petite and into “Blitzkrieg Bop” and she packed her leather pants. He’s all about poetry, especially that written on the walls of his tower by generations of earlier guardians at the gate.

Levi resists Drasa’s entreaties as “not allowed,” forcing her to wait a beat or two or three before he realizes she looks exactly Anya Freaking Taylor Joy.

The human sex drive being what it is, they’re sure to find a way to connect on a more personal level. They brag and inhumanly talk shop about their most “impossible ” long distance murders. They might share intel on their duty, puzzle over the nature of the gorge and ponder their fates when things go wrong and all they have is each other to get out of this “hell” — literal or metaphorical — alive.

A top tip — “There’s only one. Jeep.”

Screenwriter Zach Dean had a lot of ways to go with this, ways a lot more interesting and satisfying than cutting and pasting snippets of Sartre and T.S. Eliot and Buddha to read aloud from the walls of Levi’s tower.

But the idea of two amoral mass murderers who can’t sleep at night facing their demons or their sentence to hell for shooting scores and scores of people was too smart, I guess.

You’ve got to hit that second act dilemma and third act crisis and cue a cover of “All Along the Watchtower,” after all. I’m guessing the “Whiplash” and “Queen’s Gambit” gags were invented on the set. But maybe not.

Director Scott Derrickson ensures the action beats are solid enough, that the production design is CGI-assisted gloomy and that the stars looked good in whatever light, fight choreography or romantic interlude they were placed.

But the literal plunge into “explaining” and explaining some more unravels whatever mystery might have made this direct-to-Apple-TV release dramatically challenfing and theatrically releasable.

Perhaps a better agent would have sensed that from the screenplay.

Rating: PG-13, violence, bloodshed, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Miles Teller, Sope Dirisu and Sigourney Weaver.

Directed by Scott Derrickson, scripted by Zach Dean. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 2:08