Nearly 40 years after he made his big screen debut with a brief appearance in the James Bond picture “A View to a Kill,” Dolph Lundgren is still best known as an actor thanks to a series of iconic roles in ’80s and ’90s favorites like “Rocky IV,” “Masters of the Universe,” and “Universal Soldier.” (More recently he’s been a fixture in the “Expendables” and “Aquaman” franchises.) Yet for the past couple of decades, Lundgren has been quietly forging a side career as an accomplished writer and director of low-budget action films, movies that belie their limited resources in ambition and craftsmanship. Like the scrappy genre directors of Hollywood’s past — filmmakers like Budd Boetticher, Sam Fuller, and Don Siegel — Lundgren uses the creative freedom of lower budgets to smuggle his personal obsessions and stylistic preoccupations into accessible entertainments that are as intelligent as they are lively.

Lundgren’s latest release, “Wanted Man,” is one of his best, a contemporary riff on Clint Eastwood’s “The Gauntlet” that follows Johansen (Lundgren), a racist cop on assignment transporting a witness across the border from Mexico. As Johansen and the witness are targeted by the local cartels and corrupt law enforcement operatives, Johansen’s perspective on both his job and the situation at the border shifts, but the changes in the character aren’t the broad reversals of melodrama. Lundgren plays the adjustments subtly and doesn’t force them — nor does he force any false likability into the character. Johansen is a haunted antihero along the lines of Eastwood’s Wes Block or Will Munny, a violent thug who nevertheless finds some measure of convincing redemption, and whose contradictions grew from observations Lundgren made thinking about his own father.