The Last Alchemist (2012)
★½ — The Last Alchemist (2012)
San Marino is one of the smallest countries in the world (a landlocked microstate of roughly 34,000 people inside central Italy), and its film output is correspondingly rare, which makes this short a modest curiosity in its own right. Directed by Michele Massari, it features Franco Nero, the Italian genre veteran best known internationally for the original Django (1966) and decades of spaghetti westerns and Euro-thrillers, in a late-career appearance that rather outclasses its surroundings. At just thirty minutes, the film sits somewhere between a short and a feature pitch, shot on what appears to be a minimal budget against cave locations that suit the occult premise well enough on paper.
A-Z World Movie Tour San Marino The Last Alchemist. A 2012 short from San Marino starring Franco Nero looks and feels like a film that had one good idea and ran it into the ground with very little budget to back it up. Look, Franco Nero is a legend, and his presence alone gives the thing a flicker of credibility. He delivers his lines with gravitas, like he’s in some epic mystery, even when the script demands he talk about ancient secrets while standing in what looks like a repurposed storage unit with mood lighting. The story tries to be cryptic and profound (a dying alchemist, a final experiment, a twist involving time and legacy) but the execution is painfully cheap. The sets, the costumes, the green screen work, it all screams low-budget without the charm of so-bad-it’s-good. There’s a fun little nod to LOST with a Dharma Initiative-style crate in the background, which gave me a chuckle, but that’s about it for enjoyment. The twist almost makes sense in a X-Files episode kind of way. But by then, I was too distracted to care. It’s not evil, just undercooked and under-resourced. Franco Nero’s commitment deserves something, even if the rest of it doesn’t. Watch it for curiosity’s sake, maybe once, then forget it.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 2012 | Watched: 2025-08-29
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