You’d think these sorts of things would be figured out at a table read, if not in the audition.

Give your leading man his pages, make him read some of the fifth rate Raymond Chandler “tough guy” voice-over narration you have in mind.

“I only kill wolves to protect the sheep…I’m the BEST…I AM the ‘Exit Protocol.'”

Do you believe it? Do you believe him? Does he have the presence to pull off being “the best” hit man out there? An assassin’s assassin?

Scott Martin wrote, directed and acted in a Lou Diamond Phillips, Patric, Danny Trejo and Michael Paré B-movie Western titled “Big Kill” a few years back. Perhaps that’s where the delusion that he could carry a thriller was born.

But even a B/C movie like “Exit Protocol” demands a lead who won’t make the viewer feel embarrassed for veteran character actors Dolph Lundgren and Michael Jai White.

“Protocol” is a terrible script terribly conceived, directed and acted. Every time the phrase “the best” turns up we grimace in recognition that nothing here merits that phrase.

Hit man movies and those pretentious enough to label their killer an “assassin” because there’s no union rules that say they can’t are, to a one, “researched” by watching other hit man movies. Such figures are rarer than cultured, educated and erudite serial killers who love chianti and fava beans. Outside of the movies, they don’t exist.

And this nonsense of the “hitman who hunts hitmen” is totally a fictional and filmic invention.

So by design, these movies, from “Hitman” on down the line, grow dumber with every iteration. And if you don’t have an aged Pierce Brosnan or Liam Neeson or Wesley Snipes or whoever in the lead, you’re lost before you start, condemned to waste the viewer’s time.

Our contract killer Sam Hayden (Martin) narrates and narrates about being “the best” “assassin of assasins,” and how killing this or that “mark” is him doing “the world a favor.”

But “Section 8” screenwriter Chad Law and Martin do everything in their power to show us “the best” is just in his head. We meet Hayden during a botched “contract” in a church, where he’s given away the element of surprise to lecture his quarry. He shoots a lot and misses a lot.

This is repeated every time he has a hit his mob intermediary (J.B. Yowell, better suited to selling used cars, but only in a dealership his daddy owns) assigns him.

Screw that silencer on, pull the trigger and miss and miss.

Until, of course, you inexplicably befriend a grizzled killer (Lundgren, lumbering like Frankenstein’s butler Lurch these day) and have to shoot your way past legions of masked, tac-geared-up murderers. Those guys they never miss.

“Black Dynamite” White is brought in to assassinate the assassin, and the assassin assigned to kill the assassin. White tries to keep things professional, but the disappointment shows. Martin’s wife Stephanie Beran plays Wicked, another killer, because of course she does.

Listening to this dialogue and mulling over this half-assed plotting you don’t have to go to the screenwriter’s IMDb page to know how much he likes chewing gum. You can just picture it.

And director Shane Dax Taylor isn’t up to improving anything that was written or any of the acting or the drab uncinematic New Mexico locations.

Much of this crew has worked together before on similar fare (“The Best Man” is also a hitman movie), so it’s not like they didn’t know their leading man was no leading man. They’re just churning this junk out on a budget that guarantees it’ll sell, quality be damned.

So no, that’s nothing that could be discovered or corrected at a table read.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Scott Martin, Dolph Lundgren, Charlotte Kirk, Lina Maya, J.B. Yowell, Stephanie Beran and Michael Jai White.

Credits: Directed by Shane Dax Taylor, scripted by Chad Law. A Saban release.

Running time: 1:24