“Squad 36” is a ponderous Parisian police procedural that never seems to get out of its own way. Staggering from cliche to contrivance, there’s little doubt what climax the stock characters who inhabit it are headed to, and that there’ll be an anti-climax after that.

Dirty cops, dangerous gangs, intrasquad romance and police who take care of their own, it’s a French variation of that tried and true hook of American cop pictures since “Colors.” That truism “The police are just another gang” bears repeating as much of the world seems indoctrinated to the “Law & Order/Bluebloods” myth of those who “protect and serve.”

It’s a milieu where French actor turned writer-director Olivier Marchal (“Rogue City”) has found a home. Perhaps he’s too comfortable in that home for his own good.

We meet the titular six-member Anti-Crime Ssquad as Sami (Tefix Jallab), Vinny (Guillaume Pottier), Walid (Youssef Ramal), biker Hanna (Juliette Dol), Richard (Soufiane Guerrab) and Antoine (Victor Belmondo) chase canny and tough-looking mob figure Karim (Jean-Michel Correia) all over the rainy streets of Paris.

A couple of things leap to mind in this opening sequence. Why are they pursuing this armed gangster, when they won’t arrest him? Why have Hanna — the lone woman on the team — lose control of her bike so that star Belmondo (the grandson of you-know-who) can take over?

And aren’t ALL police squads “anti-crime?”

Sami is the on-task boss of them all, answering to an impatient, CYA/C-his-A higher up (Yvan Attal). But Antoine is meant to be the “colorful” one. He’s seeing Hanna on the sly. And he takes out his over-the-top aggression on foes in underground, no-holds-barred brawling for bucks.

That’s what gets Antoine kicked out to the suburbs to “a department with less confrontation.” His colleagues may insist he got a raw deal, but we know better.

Months later, when members of the squad turn up dead and one goes missing, Antoine is lured back into this lurid world of nightclubs, overlapping jurisdictions, suspect cops and suspect mobsters. Because come what may, cops take care of their own.

Adapting a novel by Michel Tourscher, Marchal fills the screen with assorting police units with varying agendas with Antonoine running afoul of some and secretly supported by others.

The violence can be sudden and random and visceral. But once we get past the “cop in fight club” first act, the narrative settles into duller shoe-leather police work, following this tip, making that contact, working outside the law because the insiders don’t want him messing around in all this.

“You mind your own business and there won’t be any repercussions” is as menacing in French (with subtitles) as it is dubbed into English.

I like the suggestions of and open displays of corruption — stealing cash from an evidence locker, higher-ups shuffling wayward cops from job to job like pedophile priests.

At least in French cop movie funerals they don’t trot out bagpipes.

But when a picture bogs down into talky, relationshippy middle-acts like this one, the viewer gets ahead of it. The big mystery is easily guessed, and early. Characters don’t have motives or relationships that aren’t contrived, simply ordained by screenwriterly convenience.

Belmondo is convincingly tough and flinty, but has a generic screen presence that suggests “supporting player with a famous last name.”

Correia, as the 50ish mobster, brings weight and charisma and layers to his role. Everybody else here is just a cog in the clumsy collective presented here, cops and killers doing what they do the way they’ve done it in hundreds of pictures just like this, many of them better than the sedentary “Squad 36.”

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Victor Belmondo,
Tewfik Jallab, Yvan Attal, Juliette Dol,
Soufiane Guerrab,
Jean-Michel Correia,
Lydia Andrei, Guillaume Pottier and Youssef Ramal

Credits: Directed by Olivier Marchal, scripted by and Olivier Dujois and Olivier Marchal, based on a novel by Michel Tourscher. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:08