A casino is a place that offers a wide variety of gambling games, often with a high house edge. It can also offer free drinks and food. These amenities are intended to entice players to stay longer and gamble more money. This practice is known as comping. In a way, it’s similar to the strategies used by marketers in other industries.
A lot of mob films struggle to balance the professional lives of their protagonists with their turbulent personal lives. Goodfellas, for instance, goes a long way to establish Henry Hill’s professional life but is less clear about his personal struggles. Casino is more focused on the latter.
This is mostly thanks to the excellent performances by its cast. Robert De Niro is once again a charismatic and brooding bad guy but he’s more than just an unstoppable force in the movie. He’s also a bit smaller than usual, as the film doesn’t confuse him for some kind of dashing underworld hero.
The other standout performance comes from Sharon Stone. She’s the type of femme fatale most men would be tempted to tame, but she’s also the type of opportunistic sex-seeker that many of them wouldn’t want to.
While not up there with Scorsese’s greatest works like Taxi Driver or Raging Bull, Casino is still a remarkable movie. It’s also a great showcase of his unmatched camera sense, with the film gliding across the screen in a frenzy of angles, movements, and framing without ever slowing down or stopping. It also features a few truly hellacious scenes, including a torture-by-vice sequence that had to be trimmed for an NC-17 rating and a baseball bat-beating scene that’s both shockingly edited and perfectly designed with sound effects.
