A casino is more than just a place to gamble. Many offer a complete luxury experience that includes world-class restaurants and entertainment. Some even offer health and fitness facilities. Visiting one of the world’s best casinos can be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“When you love someone you gotta trust ’em,” says Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro) in the opening scene of Casino, laying out a worldview that seems at odds with his status as Vegas’s reigning sports handicapper. Like Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 Showgirls, Casino depicts not only the glamorous opulence of Sin City but also its seedy underbelly. From the mob’s moneymakers like Ace to low-level hoods who take advantage of others, the movie shows how a world of lies, manipulation, and corruption can lead to personal destruction.
Although it’s Scorsese’s most violent film, Casino never descends into gratuitous violence for its own sake. The scenes of torture, the attempted murder of De Niro by a drug overdose, and Joe Pesci’s death by a gunshot to the head all have their place in the narrative because that is the reality that these characters lived.
As such, Casino has a real-world urgency that is missing from many modern crime movies. It’s also a showcase for Sharon Stone, who at the time was at the height of her career. She delivers a performance that both builds on and inverts her work in Basic Instinct. A whirlwind machine of seduction, she can keep a man awake for days and makes him feel powerless against her.