If you’re hell-bent on seeing at least one cast away samurai fights off 13th century cannibals this year, you might as well make it “Lone Samurai.”

Writer-director Josh C. Waller’s action picture has polished production values, striking locations and a cryptic vibe that suggests maybe all this head-chopping that we’re watching is all in our hero’s head.

Misleading one into thinking “This is a Japanese samurai take on Ambrose Bierce” is giving the film too much credit. But the first act is mythic and mysterious enough to lure us in, before the cannibals show up, the implausibilities pile up and the holes in the plot turn out to be a lot bigger than anything a katana sword would make.

The Okinawan model-turned-actor Shogen is our samurai, a survivor of a suicide mission to save Japan from one of the attempted naval invasions of Kublai Khan and his Yuan Dynasty minions. World War II buffs will recall that the kamikaze pilots deployed at the end of that war were named for the “divine wind” storms that kept the Mongols from coming ashore.

Our unnamed samurai was interrupted in his savage attack on an invasion ship when it foundered. He was impaled by a plank as it sank, so job one when he washes ashore is a little self-surgery to get the wooden shard out and the spurting wound bandaged and all but forgotten.

He’s on a deserted island with no hope of rescue and only komodo dragons for company. He hallucinates two “samurai pirate” boys that we take to be his sons, and has visions of his wife (Yumari Ashina). He write poems, first in his mind, then in charcoal on the stones beneath waterfalls and the like.

He finds half a sword embedded in a piece of flotsam and strains to fetch logs. Is he a Robinson Crusoe setting up housekeeping on this island? No. He builds a Torri gate which he plans to commit seppuku under.

Perhaps he doesn’t know his “suicide mission” succeeded.

But primitive islanders capture him and take him to their lair in the caverns of a nearby archipeligo. Their war leader (stuntman/actor Rama Ramadhan) crows to one and all that “There is no escape but through my stomach!”

Our hero ponders his fate, scrawls a little poetry, and settles on his play “pirate” sons’ edict.

“Nothing less than their heads” will do. His guards are the ones who find out the hard way.

“Those heads on your shoulders are mine!”

A lot of things are disorienting about what should be a fairly straightforward action picture here. Nobody is called by name. The subtitled languages appear to be Indonesian and Japanese.

And the slim, Keanu/Eddie Redmayne-bearded Shogen doesn’t look like your stereotypical samurai. He’s willowy and doesn’t carry himself in the classic balls-of-your-feet, arms exercised to wield a blade stance. Shogen looks less Japanese here than Keanu Reeves did in “47 Ronin.”

That’s intentional, as this movie invites “John Wick” comparisons no matter how unworthy of those it is.

The Indonesian locations — sinkhole waterfalls leading into caverns, solitary beaches — are terrific and the production design is generally spot on.

But the fights let us “see” the stunt choreography as blades clash and clang and nobody thinks to just aim for the gut. Our shipwrecked warrior has weapons magically appear that we’ve not seen salvaged from the shipwreck or listed on a video game pop up menu on the screen.

B-movie writer-director Waller (“McCanick,” “Camino”) has never made a movie that’s been widely-seen or praised, and “Lone Samurai” doesn’t change that.

But he’s tapped into Indonesia’s dazzling locations and action production bonafides. Maybe somebody with a better idea and more skills to realize their “vision” will follow him there.

Hopefully with no painted-up Pacific islander cannibals in tow.

Rating: R, graphic violence and lots of it

Cast: Shogen, Rama Ramadhan, Yayan Ruhian, Fatih Unru and Yumari Ashina,

Credits: Scripted and directed by Josh C. Waller. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:35