EchoVib

A glorified TV movie, “Snitch” adds a novel new argument you can present to your kids when you’re lecturing them to stay away from drugs: Your old man might end up having to work as a delivery man for a cartel on your behalf.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson eschews his usual action heroics until way too late in this weepy melodrama, which begins with his naive teenage son (Rafi Gavron) being arrested by the feds after being set up with a delivery of Ecstasy by a pal trying to avoid a drug rap.

The son, who’s facing a 10-year stretch, refuses to play an offered get-out-of-jail-free card by setting up another friend for the DEA.

This despite the pleas of Dad, who junior has barely talked to since he remarried and started a new family.

So the guilt-ridden Johnson cuts an unusual deal with a tough US attorney (Susan Sarandon).

He’ll deliver a big-time drug dealer if she’ll exercise a loophole in the federal mandatory sentencing laws to let his son go for time served.

To accomplish this, Johnson unscrupulously tempts one of the employees (Jon Bernthal) in his construction firm — an ex-convict trying to go straight.

He’ll pay the guy $20,000 if he’ll arrange an introduction to a former criminal associate (Michael Kenneth Williams of “The Wire”).

Johnson claims business is slow and offers to transport drugs in one of his trucks so the feds can make a bust.

But then the undercover DEA agent (Barry Pepper) supervising the sting decides they can use their new recruit to ensnare a much bigger fish.

A drug cartel kingpin (Benjamin Bratt), impressed with Johnson’s skills driving a big rig, wants our hero to smuggle $83 million in cash across the border into Mexico.

By this point the danger to Johnson and his family has increased a hundredfold — especially after the ex-convict learns the real reason why Johnson wanted to partner up with the cartel in the first place.

Johnson is an ingratiating actor, but an everyman he is not.

The hulking former wrestler looks like he could take out the cartel single-handed, and in another movie he probably would.

There are all sorts of other odd lapses, as when the undercover DEA agent approaches Sarandon at a public event while she’s campaigning for the Senate.

And its never clear at all how her political ambitions fit into all of this. She’s down six points in the polls, an aide informs Sarandon, “because the liberals think you’re a bitch.”

Director Ric Roman Waugh, a former stuntman who co-wrote the script with Justin Haythe, courts audience boredom by hewing to small- screen style for much of the film: lots of close-ups and lots and lots of talk.

“You’re the one teaching me what real integrity and character is all about,” Dad tells the son during one teary jailhouse visit.

The acting isn’t bad at all, but it’s in service of soap opera trimmings that include lots of earnest conversations with Johnson’s ex-wife (Melina Kanakaredes) and current wife (Nadine Velazquez).

Eventually our hero figures out that his life is expendable to the DEA in its mission to take down the cartel, and decides to do things “his way.”

Unfortunately for the audience, this involves a lot of stunt driving and weapons fire — which would be OK, except that like all the violence in this PG-13 movie, the results are sanitized and bloodless.

So is the script, which is described in the press notes as a “ripped-from the-headlines action adventure” inspired by an episode of PBS’ “Frontline.”

I haven’t seen this particular show, but I doubt that the father forced to take extreme measures to save his son because of the mandatory-sentencing laws looked much like Dwayne Johnson.

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