A distraught, unstable, rules-breaking “maverick” cop is assigned a new partner to keep his demons at bay?

” I feel like I’m in ‘Lethal Weapon,’” the new partner cracks.

“I know, right?”

As action comedies go, the Mexican riff on the “Lethal” movies “A Time for Bravery” takes forever to truly land a laugh. An hour goes by with maybe a grin or a smirk at most.

But the last 40 minutes of “La hora de los Valientes” (in Spanish, subtitled, or in English) makes this high-stakes but inconsequential buddy picture tolerable.

Thank “Narcos: Mexico” star Luis Gerardo Méndez for that. As Dr. Silverstein, a psychotherapist forced — via “community service” — to babysit and ride-along with wife-just-left-him loose cannon Detective Diaz (Memo Villegas of the dramas “Sin Numbre” and “Prayers for the Stolen”), Méndez finds a few laughs in the fish-out-of-water absurdity of this situation.

And Damián Szifron’s script eventually makes its way to what might be funny about having a shrink on a ride-along — counseling the cop, facing danger himself, understanding how human nature can save your skin in a world of thieves, lowlifes and highly-placed corruption, all of whom are big on murderous threats.

“One more question and you’ll catch a stray bullet!”

Dr. Silverstein — even in Mexico, the stereotypical movie psychotherapist is Jewish — is forever trying to calm thugs down and make his not-quite-out-of-control partner/”patient” a little less prone to running every red light and pulling out a gun to get the “truth” out of this informant, that suspect or Dr. Silverstein’s might-be-cheating girlfriend (Verónica Bravo).

Detective Diaz is a little touchy about faithless lovers. And he’s got the arrogance of an armed, law-unto-himself and almost immune to prosecution cop.

There’s a ruthless, highly-placed villain (Christian Tappan) who makes people disappear. He has two soldiers he’s bribed killed in the film’s opening scene.

As the grizzled police commissioner (Noé Hernández) has no idea why two soldiers have gone missing how high up their disappearance reaches and how deadly the scheme that involved them is, he gives Diaz — with a shrink/partner — the case as “occupational therapy.”

The stumbling shrink asks a lot of questions as Diaz veers from despairing to reckless (red light runner), poking at the “confronation” the angry cop has avoided and the closure he won’t get until he has that.

But Silverstein is leery of the “Wild West out there,” in a country with criminals on the loose and police and officials at every level corrupted, all of them using the “but my salary” excuse.

Silverstein amusingly makes “in a well run country” cracks and lectures to bad guys. And of course he learns on the job how to fire a gun and talk tough. That business of sneaking into a secure facility with nothing but a street cop’s stolen uniform to get him to “the restricted area?” That’s improvised, and it plays an amusing set-up to start the final showdown.

I’m not seeing many comedies on the Villegas resume, so he’s far from a natural in this role. Even as a straight man he’s humorlessly humorless. Most everybody else plays things so straight that nothing much amusing comes out of their characters or their scenes, as written.

That only pays off in the case of the deadpan villain in charge.

But Méndez kind of makes this silly, coincidence-packed nonsense play. Sort of.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Luis Gerardo Méndez, Memo Villegas,
Verónica Bravo, Noé Hernández and Christian Tappan.

Credits: Directed by Ariel Winograd, scripted by Damián Szifron. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47