“The Passenger” is a classic “two-hander,” a thriller that parks two characters center stage and piles on suspense in a battle of wits, agendas and brawn over the course of a long shuttle bus ride.

It stars Djimon Hounsou as a Somali immigrant driver trapped in his vehicle on a long haul with a lone rider (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who, it turns out, planted a bomb at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport and is now apparently making his getaway.

Now throw away all of the promise of that premise, all the bickering over who will get blamed for the bombing if they get stopped — the young white guy or the Musli — all the fraught potential over being a hostage of a killer who might kill again.

Because this Vadim Perelman adaptation of a Bennett Fisher play is pretty much dead on arrival. I’d call it a non-starter, but it sets up well, showing us a bit of the background of our put-upon driver and suggesting some mystery to the mad-eyed bomber.

It’s well cast, and the setting has built-in claustrophobia. The stakes couldn’t be higher, a terrorist who could strike again and a hapless working man who sees that, and the personal cost that picking up the wrong passenger has for him, his wife (Leigh-Ann Rose) and child.

“If I get pulled over I lose it all!”

But director Perelman, famous for “The House of Sand and Fog,” fails at almost every turn when it comes to building suspense.

The film practically pauses as our manic, rambling, drug-snorting 20something launches into his manifesto — his scatterbrained reasons for carrying out this heinous act against innocents. And it’s not like “The Passenger” was hurtling towards a nerve-wracking climax before that, or after it.

“I tried to do something good!” may be the silliest line in the history of unintentionally silly villain lines. The questioning of Hassan, “Ever think about going back?” (to Somalia) and “The whole ‘Blackhawk Down’ thing,” provokes eye-rolls as well.

There’s an awkward stop at a convenience store, a racist tirade by a customer and young Lloyd’s profane, over-the-top response, which is just the thing a hoodie-wearing bomber needs to be doing, seeing as how the authorities are already looking for the Somali driver with a backpack seen looking sketchy on CCTV cameras at the airport.

But whatever forward progress the narrative makes on this “I’ll pay cash” off-the-books ride to Chicago, the lack of urgency takes away.

Former child actor Smit-McPhee (TV’s “Disclaimer”) doesn’t dial up the mania to make his character feared, fanatical or even understandable as a fictional creation. Disenchanted “Lloyd” is just a collection of tics and self-aborbed, murky grievances.

Hounsou never phones it in, but we can feel his loss of faith in the screenplay in the middle acts, before the melodrama of the Big (not really) Finish.

Everybody involved has been better in other films and series. Which is why we acknowledge the failed screenplay and blame it for the dull movie that came from it and the less-interesting-than-they-need to be characters portrayed in it.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Djimon Hounsou, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Carolina Campos and Leigh-Ann Rose

Credits: Directed by Vadim Perelman, scripted by Bennett Fisher, based on his play. A Vertical release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:33