Casino (2006, HD DVD)

I'll admit off the bat that I have a weakness for organized crime movies, but I do believe that Casino is a thoroughly enjoyable film despite its numerous flaws.

The story centers around Sam or "Ace" (Robert De Niro), a professional gambler who always wins, who gets sent by the mafia bosses to run their casino in Vegas, the Tangiers'. They also send his boyhood friend, Nicky (Pesci), to protect him. Sam runs a tight ship; he knows everything there is to know about gambling, and so he makes a lot of money. He's got things under control, and he's sending money back to the bosses, and he just got married to the woman he loves, Ginger (Sharon Stone). Everything's going well until everyone starts slipping.

It should have been perfect. I mean, he had me, Nicky Santoro, his best friend watching his a*s. And he had Ginger, the woman he loved on his arm. But in the end, we f*cked it all up.

Nicky sees how much money is in Las Vegas, but wants no part of "legitimate" businesses like Sam does. Instead, he starts robbing places and killing people. He ends up in the police's black book; his name is right next to Al Capone's. The feds are watching Nicky play golf at Sam's house for so long that they have to emergency land on the fairway and get some gas. And since everyone knows that Sam and Nicky were childhood friends, everything Nicky does has a negative effect on Sam, who is trying so hard to just run a legitimate casino.

Sam is too much of a businessman and fires an idiot slots manager, who happens to have family ties to all the politicians in Vegas. He doesn't realize that the move will cost him his casino. His relationship with Nicky becomes very estranged because Sam thinks Nicky is too reckless and Nicky thinks Sam is a pansy.

Ginger marries Sam mostly for his money and is constantly giving huge sums of Sam's money to her ex-pimp, and starts to abuse drugs. Sam knows she sleeps around, but she also has an affair with someone she really wouldn't get involved with if she had any brains.

There are other people involved in screwing everything up, including clever feds who stick listening devices in opportune places, the mafia bosses back home who'll do anything to protect themselves, frontmen who have no problem squealing, and more. But mostly, Sam, Ginger, and Nicky have themselves to blame.

So by the end of the movie, everything is in shambles. And it's an interesting story, so I thoroughly enjoyed this film. There's still lots of stuff wrong with Casino, however.

First of all, I know Casino has to be a violent movie by necessity. But sometimes it just gets way too gratuitious. The scene where Nicky has a guy's head stuck in a vice until his eyeballs pop out (I think) had me putting a hand over my computer screen like a little girl (at least I didn't cover my eyes). Apparently, he also slits his throat afterwards too. I wouldn't know. Actually, now that I think about it, this is really the only scene that made me too squeamish.

Most of this movie is narrated by De Niro and Pesci, which I found annoying. The acting is mostly good. De Niro does a good job of sounding and looking like a very calm guy, which works for Sam, because he's not a violent or emotional guy by nature. I felt that the Sam character was a better fit for De Niro than the violent yet charming Jimmy Conway from Goodfellas. Still, Sam isn't really all that tough of a role. Pesci's voice sounds weird in this movie, but he does a pretty good job at portraying this guy with an extremely short fuse, but it's the same exact role he had in Goodfellas. Nicky and Tommy are completely interchangeable. Nicky drops the f-bomb so many times that it felt tacked on lots of the time. When he says things like "You f*cking f*ck you!", it doesn't seem like he means it.

Did you know that Sharon Stone was once good looking? I had no idea. She does a great job in the first half of the movie as the charming and beautiful Ginger. I suppose she does a pretty good job as junkie Ginger, but I just kept willing her to die already, so I couldn't really enjoy it. So she does a great job of acting, but her character is just so repugnant that it's frustrating. Why doesn't Sam just let her take all the money and just leave?

Casino also just isn't as action-packed as Goodfellas. I must've watched the latter over a dozen times, simply because whenever I was bored, I could pick any random scene of Goodfellas to watch, and I'd be entertained. Casino doesn't have that kind of appeal.

Oh, and the first bit of Casino is so stupid. Sam walks out of his house in a pink suit, his car blows up, and then a classical score starts with explosions in background and Sam's body being thrown around or something. It was incredibly lame.

Still, Casino is a fun movie, with a good dose of action, a very sympathetic character in Sam, and a few bursts of great dialogue and some comic relief here and there. It's no Goodfellas, but this movie more than holds its own. There's nothing like a good mafia film.