IMDb #140 Review: Casino (1995)

Source: Wikipedia

The magical land of Las Vegas. Planet of fancy suits and flashy lights and soiled consciences and staggering luxury. Where the desert blooms and savings evaporate and everything goes horribly wrong for the rich bastards who have it all.

Right from the get-go, our narrator goes up in a fireball that used to be his sports car.

Anyway, roll back to the seventies. Charming info-hoarding gambler Ace teams up with his violent Italian buddy Nicky to take over Vegas. Through hard work and uncompromising attention to detail, Ace soon runs a huge (crooked) casino, unhappily married to a beautiful sociopathic hustler. Through violence and threats of violence, his buddy Nicky takes over the underworld. And gets banned from every casino in Vegas in the process.

(Sometimes I swear Scorsese secretly wants to make documentaries. The rise and fall of organized crime syndicates. Failing that, he'll stage high-budget high-life dramas, fictionalized epics loosely adapted from true stories.)

Anyway, on with the eighties. As with everything else eighties, little issues from the previous decade snowball into an avalanche of problems. An exquisitely crafted crime machine breaks down. Sprockets pop out, springs are sprung, and a high-velocity thingamajig clocks the safety inspector in the noggin. Those kinda problems.

To wit. The law cracks down on the casino operation, courtesy of the cowboy county commissioner. Money disappears. The Kansas City mob bosses are seriously peeved. The anti-heroes fall out with their wives and kids and each other.

As usual in trying times, the only recourse is infidelity. (This list's single most recurring theme.) The other recourse, revenge, arrives just in time to clear off the chessboard and set up the pieces for the next round of the endless unwinnable game.

Mad props to the cast, for delivering some of the most brilliantly acted freakouts I've ever seen. Especially Sharon Stone as the drugged-up strung-out wife Ginger. And to the researchers, for packing enough juicy details into these tight three hours to make the audience feel like savvy inhabitants of a bright bygone age. And to the director, for making sure it all happened precisely as it was supposed to.

Hell, accolades all around, everything's just fantastic.

178 minutes.