Martin Scorsese directs Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone and Joe Pesci in this crime drama based on the true story of the mob’s last decades controlling Las Vegas.

Always exists in the shadow of Goodfellas. It is a perfectly fine movie in its own right, but all of its separate qualities feel like tweaks. Tweaks to be different yet rarely for the better. Not detrimental but lacking improvements. The movie feels the absence of Ray Liotta’s youth, there’s no lost innocence here. Just terrible people making bad decisions. Bad decisions in a garish, overlit, hot pink hell. Wow! This movie looks like Seventies synthetic headache. You are never once seduced by the glamour. The wealth is chintzy, phoney, temporary. And it moves with a cocaine restlessness. Thelma Schoonmaker squeezes a lot of storytelling in, expertly. Casino proves a difficult three hour movie to pause for a comfort break as there is never a shot that doesn’t feed into the next one almost the moment after it started. Possibly Sharon’s best acting turn? Pesci gifts us premium hair trigger psycho. There’s a glorious opening credit sequence from Mr and Mrs Bass. Yet this is the rare Scorsese flick that feels like it has nothing to new to say. A sequel in all but name, lacking the risk and psychological ambiguity that motors his many finer works.

8

Perfect Double Bill: Goodfellas (1990)

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