Solo is an odd piece of 90s cyborg/super-soldier jetsam that piled up on video store shelves, getting wedged between higher-profile titles like Universal Soldier (92) and Soldier (98). It didn’t have the budget, star power, or staying power of those heavyweights, but it did have something worth watching: Mario Van Peebles jumping feet-first into a role that could’ve been easily phoned in by any muscle-bound ex-bouncer with dreams of being the next Joe Lara.
For the uninitiated, Van Peebles plays the titular Solo, a state-of-the-art military android who gains a conscience and defects from his programmed mission to protect a small village from the very forces that created him. It’s straightforward stuff, but he injects surprising heart and physicality into the journey-toward-humanity trope, bringing stoic intensity and even melancholy to a character who could’ve been just another walking weapon in lesser hands.
The execution is pure budget-bin 90s: cheap props and effects, standard-issue shootouts, and story beats that lean heavily on re-heated clichés, including William Sadler as a superbly cartoonish military commander. Keep an eye out for young Adrien Brody dropping some expository technobabble, though. Still, Solo attempts to be more than explosions and gunfire, it’s thinking deep thoughts about free will and identity.
Solo isn’t A-list 90s sci-fi action, but it’s a fascinating artifact of its time – a movie that aimed to sit next to T2 but drifted into the same cyber-flotsam as American Cyborg, Cyber Tracker, Hologram Man, and TC 2000. There’s something admirable about how hard Van Peebles swings for the top shelf, even if the movie ended up in the discount ex-rental bin.
It should have made a bigger splash. I’ve always had plenty of time for this one, but in the end, Solo is one of those washed-up curiosities that desperately clings to the edges of 90s nostalgia, a forgotten ripple in the heavy flood of VHS-era manborg flics. -Pop