For a long time, I thought of the writer-director Rod Lurie as an interesting and ambitious creator of topical drama — hot-button political films like “Deterrence” (1999) and “The Contender” (2000), the trenchant Valerie Plame muckraker “Nothing but the Truth” (2008), the misfired remake of “Straw Dogs” (2011). But Lurie, it’s fair to say, now has two filmmaking identities. There’s the middlebrow dramatist, and there’s the director of hot-wire combat spectacle who first emerged, in 2019, with “The Outpost,” an Afghanistan War drama that was one of most riveting and authentic movies about the experience of war in the post-9/11 world. Lurie is a U.S. Army veteran, and “The Outpost” brought him to a new peak as a filmmaker.

So when I learned that his new movie, “Lucky Strike,” is a combat thriller set during World War II, I was primed for more of the new Rod Lurie (and, in fact, he has even tweaked his name, now billing himself as Rod Davis Lurie). For a while, “Lucky Strike” feels like a film by the director of “The Outpost.” Scott Eastwood, with his chiseled, thin-lipped echo of his father’s squinty mystique (though Scott is like a more affable version of Clint), plays Capt. Castle, a soldier who was eligible for a deferment — due to his stateside work as an engineer — but enlisted anyway. It’s December 1944, in the Ardennes forest in Belgium (a pivot-point battle locale during WWII), and Castle is ordered to lead half a dozen of his men to a destination several hours away from base camp, where they’re to block a key road with explosives. They’re driving a faulty truck, which they’re forced to abandon, and after reaching the locale on foot they begin the job of booby-trapping it.

The film lulls us into wanting to see them succeed. But they’re surrounded by Nazis, and before long a sniper starts picking the men off. Lurie stages all of this with fraught existential command. Even the shots glimpsed through binoculars are done with originality — not the standard cardboard-cutout thing but waxy, thick-glassed images that suggest a world of action out of reach. Castle figures out where the sniper fire is coming from, and as he and another soldier crawl up the woodsy hill from the road, they spot a bunker, where there are two German soldiers. A strategically tossed grenade puts an end to them (or so it seems), but Castle’s squad is decimated, and he’s been shot in the thigh. Can he make it the 30 kilometers to the rally port at Elsenborn?

“Lucky Strike” is now a different film from the one we thought we were watching. But there are two dimensions that make it a lesser film. Part of Lurie’s power as a director of combat cinema is the way he captures the fast, spiky, shit-talking camaraderie of soldiers; he’s got a sixth sense for it. But once Castle is on his own, that quality leaks out of the movie. And since Eastwood, who’s a very good actor, does indeed carry a mythic echo of his father, the casting lets us know something: that he’s probably not going to be fragged in the next hour. That kind of tamps down the suspense.

“Lucky Strike” isn’t a raw combat drama so much as a lone-wolf genre film, something that feels tidier and maybe safer. Lurie stages it with skill; it’s not like what happens is predictable. But it’s not enthralling either. Castle constantly has to improvise, as when he strangles a soldier with a phone cord, or when he’s given shelter at a farmhouse by a Belgian woman and her daughter, only to have a posse of German soldiers show up. He hides himself in the cellar, but when the younger woman is threatened, he can’t help himself — he bursts out and starts firing. At one point he takes over a German tank, drives it off a cliff, then can’t get out. He impersonates a dead soldier in the road (a Nazi pees on his helmet), then realizes that the corpse next to him is alive, which could blow his cover. He’s in hell without a rule book.

The movie’s melodramatic timpani score is effective, even if it feels like a 1950s touch. So does the reference made by the film’s title — the fact that the American soldiers consider it good luck to always burn through the logo of a Lucky Strike cigarette. Yet watching “Lucky Strike,” I kept wondering: Why did Rod Lurie make this movie? The drama of a solo hero-survivor negotiating the final days of World War II doesn’t exactly feel connected to our world. And when the movie finally does make its plea for relevance, which hinges on the life-saving importance of Castle’s radio, it seems to come out of another film entirely — namely, “Hidden Figures” (2016), with its homage to the diversity of unsung scientists. “Lucky Strike” presents Lurie the war-film director in miniature, and there’s no shame in that. But what the film suggests is that he shouldn’t be shying away from the combat maximalist inside him.