“Inspector Zende” is an action comedy take on an infamous real-life serial killer case, a movie that hunts for laughs in hapless but dogged Indian policing.

Writer-director Chinmay Mandlekar makes his feature directing debut in this made-for-Netflix movie, and never comes close to finding a tone that works or delivers chuckles.

Screen veteran Manoj Bajpayee (“The Fable,” “Satya”) has the title role, an intrepid and principled 1980s Mumbia precinct commander who gained fame for catching “The Swimsuit Killer” fifteen years before, a European serial murderer whose escapes earned him another nickname — “The Snake.”

Now Carl Bhojraj (names and nicknames changed for the movie) has managed to dose the guards at Tihar Prison in Dehli and make his getaway with four accomplices. Zende’s boss (Sachin Khedekar) is an ambitious striver who figures that he has just the man to catch this creep — the one who caught him all those years ago. That leaves Zende speechless.

“Have you got the role of Gandhi’s third monkey in some movie,” the police commissioner wants to know?

That “speak no evil” joke might be the best gag in the movie.

Zende’s precinct has no working phone, when we meet him. His grinning subordinates seem incapable of much more than writing a parking ticket. But using police work guided by instincts and gut feelings, Zende is sure they’ll track down and apprehend the killer.

“The mongoose always gets the snake,” he purrs. It’s personal, he suggests.

“Totally lost face,” he tells “Commissioner,” his cute nickname for his wife (Giraja Oak).

“But who did?”

“The whole nation.”

It helps that our handsome predator (actor Jim Sarbh could be Adam Driver’s twin) likes high living. He only stays in “five star hotels” and preys on women and others who can line his pockets and ease his escape from India. Dressing up as hotel room service attendants is a clever way for the cops to peek into every room.

Hotels and clubs from Mumbai to Goa will be scoured, often with our team of cops walking five abreast in slow-motion, set to music. The gangster do this, too. Contacts “on the street” will be visited — in musical montages. And Zende will tear his sunglasses off, with David Caruso flair, when the dramatic need arises.

It’s all nonsensical, which is the point. After all, the killer’s only targeting “foreigners,” right?

There’s little that would pass for police work — moments of torture or feigned torture of suspects played for laughs (and never really landing one), near misses in hotels, clubs, beaches and the like.

Bajpayee plays Zende straight, offering aphorisms so corny they might be funnier in Hindi than dubbed into (Indian accented) English. Sarbh never really puts his heart into the pitiless murderer business, and can’t find anything funny about “Carl” either.

The best sequence might be a jurisdictional battle that threatens to turn bloody if somebody doesn’t let somebody else get credit for the capture, or near capture, or catch-and-release.

Serial killer comedies have been around since Chaplin’s “Monsieur Verdoux,” so it’s not as if this famous case can’t be played for fun. But there are few things worse than disguises that don’t amuse, bungled arrests that don’t amount to much more than a forced smile and cricket jokes that, to use a baseball analogy, are never more than “a swing and a miss.”

Rating: TV-MA, violence, smoking, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Manoj Bajpayee, Jim Sarbh, Girija Oak and Sachin Khedekar

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chinmay Mandlekar. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52