Directed by Martin Scorsese
Starring Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, Joe Pesci, Don Rickles, Kevin Pollak and James Woods
In my review of The Third Man, I briefly talked about the love affair that critics have with crime dramas. For the life of me, I've never understood why this subgenre gets SUCH praise from the high-minded intelligentsia responsible for those holy Rotten Tomatoes numbers. I've never understood it and likely never will. It's strange, in a way, because I'm a huge true crime buff who loves reading about serial killers and the grisly details associated with them. But yet, films about life in the mafia leave me eternally cold. In book form, the author can be a partial observer, giving you glimpses into the minds of bad people. The films, though, come across to me as painful chores. Film is visual, and watching people make bad choices and do bad things over and over and over until their eventual poetic justice moment is the cinematic equivalent of beating me over the head with a sledgehammer.
There are no directors who personify this more than Martin Scorsese. He's considered the greatest living film-maker, and from a technical standpoint I can't debate this very much. I've seen a decent amount of his films and even enjoyed some of them. Taxi Driver is undoubtedly my favorite, a movie that presents us with a strangely likable psychopath in Travis Bickle and drops us into his life. It's one of my favorite movies of all time. I initially hated Raging Bull, but now appreciate it much more as a character study of a guy who has the ability to do great things and squanders it because of his violent jealousy. GoodFellas is even good fun for what it is. The rest I can more or less forget, none moreso than The Last Temptation of Christ, a.k.a. the movie with the unintended hilarity of Harvey Keitel braying out lines as Judas Iscariot with his thick Brooklyn accent.
Casino - the 1995 film that followed Mean Streets and GoodFellas in his pantheon of movies about the Mafia - is more of the same, a hopelessly repetitive 180-minute slog of bad people doing bad things. Our lead bad guy here is Sam "Ace" Rothstein, professional gambler and handicapper who is so successful at what he does that the Chicago mob sends him to Vegas to run the newly-opened Tangiers Casino. If you've seen Robert DeNiro in any mob movie going all the way back to The Godfather Part II, you know what to expect with this character. He's a hard-nosed dude who expects everyone to worship him for his ability to make money by any means necessary and gets very mad when people don't. Having said that, no one plays the role better, and I respect the hell out of this guy's acting commitment, no matter how much of an insufferable ivory tower douche he has become in recent years. Separating the art from the artist has never been harder for me than it is with him, but it can be done.
Casinos are a dirty business. They're designed by the very laws of probability to take your money, and Sam is all about the money, baby. The movie throws in additional spice via the two main side characters. First is Nicky Santoro, with Joe Pesci playing Joe Pesci once again as a short man who can beat up anyone he meets and has a temper that makes Gordon Ramsay envious. He serves as the muscle to Sam's casino operation, and his criminal activities eventually bring law enforcement to the Tangiers. The other character is Ginger McKee, played by Sharon Stone in what I found to be a very overblown and melodramatic performance. She was pitch-perfect in Basic Instinct; I don't understand how this is supposed to be the pinnacle of her acting career. The character is a hustler who Sam falls in love with and eventually marries, leading to all sorts of wonderful scenes involving domestic squabbles and cocaine use. Everything eventually builds up to bad news for Sam, who winds up losing everything in his empire. The end.
When compiling my notes for this review, it occurred to me that it does me no use to talk about the plot of this film and bitch about why I don't like it. Instead, I'm going to try something different. I want to dive deep and try to explain WHY critics have such a boner for movies like this. Why are films like Casino, GoodFellas and The Godfather so highly regarded?
I can't deny that these films are well-made. Starting with Francis Ford Coppola's execution of Mario Puzos' source material in The Godfather, the movies are almost universally beautifully shot and executed. They're also very well-done in the planning stages. From a screenplay standpoint, the famous crime drama movies have an intricate structure that demands the attention of the viewer, rewarding you for listening intently to the dialogue and picking out the traits of each main character. Which are usually hot tempers and drug use. The acting in these films are almost universally wonderful, with Bobby D, Joey P and company diving fully into their Strasberg method manuals and inhabiting the characters that do these bad things.
But they are just SO amazingly redundant, even with what I can acknowledge to be their good qualities. Let's go through a typical crime drama formula. We meet an opportunistic character when they are on the borderline of the criminal world and see them get initiated into that world. The character or characters commit their first bad deeds, maybe even being slightly put off by it but easily seduced by the money and power perks that their new profession provides. The film's ever-present, grating voice-over introduces us to a vast network of hired goons and professionals associated with the main character as they dive headlong into their new lifestyle, picking up a drug or alcohol habit while also cheating on their spouses and violently threatening anyone who is a minor inconvenience to their position of power. It is because of these vices that the character is eventually either killed, imprisoned or totally alone, a lesson in the dangers of greed and giving in to your id.
That outline, which fits almost every crime drama that I've seen, is Casino. It hits the beats just like all of the films that came before and after. They run counter to the traditional hero's journey narrative that most films take, and I can only guess that this is the reason why critics publicly applaud these films to such a degree. They're different, and when your job is to see as many movies as possible, different must undoubtedly be good. This mindset is understandable. And it's for this reason why, for as much as I personally have never been a big fan of Martin Scorsese, I believe that he's totally right about Marvel movies, because every single one of those goddamn things is the same way more than mob movies ever will be.
Rating time: * out of ****. Casino is wonderfully shot, executed, and acted. But I just have to ask, what is the value here? I repeatedly said, out loud, "alright, WE GET IT!" while watching this film. For the record, this is my least favorite film in the project thus far.
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