Flick of The Day: Casino

The relationship between director Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro goes back a long way and is perhaps one of the most fruitful in recent film history. Starting with Mean Streets in 1973 and including such classics as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and past flick of the day Goodfellas. Thus far their final and eight collaboration is today's flick of the day, Casino, an epic telling of the rise and fall of the Mafia in Las Vegas in the 1970's and 80's.

Casino 

Based on a true story, Casino attempts over the course of nearly three hours to tell the life and times of three characters central to the story of the American Mafia in the Las Vegas casino industry. Robert De Niro is Ace Rothstein, a masterful gambler and tipster who after a successful career making money bookmaking for the mob is sent to Las Vegas to take over the running of their new prize, the Teamsters funded Tangiers Casino. Joe Pesci is Nicky Santoro, a vicious thug with an eye for making money who is sent to Vegas to keep Ace safe. Finally there is Sharon Stone, as the coked out hooker Ginger McKenna, Ace's partner of choice and a woman with little or no redeeming features and a lust for money and jewels. In comparison to the other two, Ace is a model citizen by Vegas standards and out to run a fair game and make the Tangiers the best house in town. Shot with the feel of a docu-drama, although perhaps the best acted one ever, it gives the film the feeling of one long anecdote about the city. The film is littered with voice-over dialogue as Ace and Nicky feel their way first to success before the inevitable overreach and ultimately a bloody and disastrous end. 

On its release in 1995 hopes were high for Casino bringing together as it did the team that had created Goodfellas in 1990, still one of the all time great gangster pictures. While this is not in the same league as that film, it has moments of genuine greatness. An explosive (literally) opening credits set the scene perfectly and promise much. It as much about Vegas in the 70's as it is about the characters and again I come back to the docu-drama feel. There is just so much detail of the period packed in that it can be at times overwhelming. Roughly the opening 90 minutes detail the rise to power of Ace and Nicky with Ace building the biggest and best casino in town and Nicky taking an iron grip of the underbelly of the city while the second half details the downfall as the FBI and the gaming authorities crack down. It is with typical Scorsese flair that the minutiae of  how the mob skimmed money out of a supposedly legitimate business are played out.

While De Niro and Pesci give typically bravura performances and Stone achieves the dubious honour of being perhaps the most annoying screen character of all time, ultimately this doesn't satisfy in the same manner as some of their earlier collaborations. Perhaps it is just a case of excess in every area of the film. It is more violent than Goodfellas or Taxi Driver to a sometimes shocking degree, it carries an epic running length of 3 hours and a level of detail in its examination of a period in Vegas history. I suppose I am saying it is less than the sum of its parts. Perhaps that is too negative because when the film is at its best, it is very good indeed. It just isn't the classic it promised to be.

All in all, a very entertaining piece of cinema history containing perhaps the last collaboration between two of the all time greats. It perfectly captures a time and a place while the period costumes and sets are easy on the eye, the kind of technically gifted film-making that Scorsese is the master of. Each of the leads captures their characters to a tee and if ultimately it isn't a classic, it is an enjoyable 3 hours.