"Actor: Lucas Dudley"

• Solo | DVD | (12/04/2004) from £12.97   |  Saving you £-3.99 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Mario Van Peebles stars as a force of one in Solo a high-octane power fuelled action-thriller about an Army android who learns to think - and kill - for himself. The Army's biggest threat since the atom bomb Solo is indestructible - made to look like flesh and blood he is actually constructed of polymers and computer chips - and wired to win every battle. But when innocent civilians are torched by his unit Solo discovers he's on the wrong side of an illegal operation and heading on a collision course with Col. Madden (William Sadler) a man as implacable and pitiless as Solo was designed to be. Now the Army's ultimate weapon is waging a one man war against his own creators...

• Solo | DVD | (01/10/1999) from £12.96   |  Saving you £10.02 (100.50%)   |  RRP £19.99

  There is a hint, albeit a very brief one, of James Whale's classic 1931 Frankenstein in this low-budget movie about a robot soldier, Solo (Mario Van Peebles), created by the Pentagon to be the perfect, unfeeling fighting machine. When Solo is sent into Central American jungles to battle guerrillas, a flaw in his program emerges when it is discovered that he has compassion and a conscience. Fleeing his keepers, the robot becomes part of a jungle village after its inhabitants get over the need to run from him (this is where the Frankenstein parallel comes in). The film isn't particularly clever, just noisy and ugly, and one can't help but think of it as a knock-off of The Terminator. Van Peebles doesn't seem the ideal choice for an action hero along the lines of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Kurt Russell--who do this kind of thing well--but then again this is straight-to-video fodder. --Tom Keogh