An elite Mexican commando unit battling cartels and corruption must shoot and fight its way north — to safety in Brownsville — in the chest-thumping shoot-em-up “Counterattack.”

Nothing is made of that irony, and that’s just one of many loose threads in this loose cannon B-movie from South of the Border.

Luis Alberti is Captain Guerrero, who finishes up an afternoon of drinking and gambling with a pal by intervening when two women (Mayra Batalla and Frida Jiser) trying to report a mass grave they’ve found are hassled by cartel goons and corrupt cops.

The captain is so celebrated and intimidating that he wins the stand-off with a legion of armed mob minions and local police, and gets to just walk away after having shot a couple of bad guys — including one with a badge.

That’s the logic here. Don’t judge “how they do things in Mexico” and don’t pay too much attention to how things transpire. Try not to get too far ahead of the utterly formulaic plot and don’t sweat the layers and layers of plot lapses and genre tropes and cliches.

When’s that next shootout, compadres?

Captain Guerrero is part of a unit called Murcielagos — “bats.” The cartel leader they’re hunting (Noé Hernández) and his brother (Israel Islas) have it in for these soldiers, blaming them for killing their father. That’s why they filled a ditch with dead soldiers, which the two women — one of them on her way for an abortion — find.

The villains ambush Guerrero and his closest subordinates — nicknamed Tanque, Pollo, Toro and Combo (Leonardo Alonso, Luis Curiel, Guillermo Nava, David Calderón León) — when they’re off duty, heading north for a U.S. shopping trip.

When the army men turn the tide and wipe out their ambushers, it’s game on as they’re on foot, the bad guys’ “dogs” are in pursuit (Ishbel Baustista plays their ace tracker) and the only hope for our heroes is a “safe” extraction either near the border, or across it in Texas.

The movie sets up several promising subtexts, and all but forgets almost every one of them as we lurch from shoot-out to shoot-out, with the Murcielagos battling long odds and never missing what they aim at — unless it’s a senior bad guy, whom they wound. So he can make a speech.

After every firefight that the five survive, they “report,” aka “sound off” — “Combo STANDING,” “Tanque STANDING…”

The shootouts are first-rate, in that “bad guys mostly miss, good guys never do” way.

Alberti is a most charismatic lead, and Hernández does what he can with the doting dad/ranting, raving and murderous drug lord at work stereotype. The willowy Bautista was an interesting choice to play the tough broad killer/tracker “Cobra.”

But nothing here is written or directed in a way to make it memorable beyond that moment when the credits start and Netflix is trying to convince you to begin watching something else without giving you the chance to say “Not so fast.”

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Luis Alberti, Leonardo Alonso, Luis Curiel, Guillermo Nava, David Calderón León, Mayra Batalla, Frida Jiser, Ishbel Bautista, Israel Islas and Noé Hernández

Credits: Directed by Chava Cartas, scripted by Jose Ruben Escalante Mendez . A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:24