Film Review – Shrapnel

Just a few weeks ago, director William Kaufman (“Jarhead 3: The Siege,” “The Marine 4: Moving Target”) submitted “The Channel” to the masses, delivering a low-budget study of brotherhood and violence with plenty of unrealized potential. It was bro-happy entertainment without a deeper sense of drama, struggling with cliché and limited financial support. Kaufman returns with his second film of July, “Shrapnel,” which once again submits a small-scale tale of family and survival, this time taking concerns to a border town in Texas, where a concerned father searches for his missing daughter. Cartel antagonisms rise up, but there’s little to the viewing experience beyond shoot-outs and pained faces. “Shrapnel” is buoyed by leading work from Jason Patric, who pushes to bring passably authentic emotions to an otherwise generic siege tale, giving as good a performance as one can possibly expect from a B-movie with limited storytelling goals. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com