‘Casino’s‘ Running Time Longer Than Story Line
“Casino” might have been a very good movie if it had lost about one of its three hours. But director Martin Scorsese doesn’t know when to pull the plug.
Much of it is fascinating, particularly the early scenes of Las Vegas in the 1970s, when Midwest bookie Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro) and his best friend Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) take over several casinos for the mob.
The first hour succeeds as an insider’s view of the casino world, where ex-cheats spy on unsuspecting new cheats, and the most elaborate and brutal methods are used to keep them from stealing too much at the gambling tables.
The volatile Nicky is the hit man who takes care of the more extreme problems, but the quieter Ace is just as capable of protecting his interests. That is, until he grows comfortable enough to think he can buy anything.
When Ace insists on marrying one of the savviest local golddiggers, Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone), it turns out that she’s still attached to an old boyfriend (James Woods). She tries to see him again, Ace turns obsessive and jealous, Ginger turns to drugs and alcohol, and Nicky gets directly involved in their troubles.
While this sounds like a formula for tabloid tragedy, the actors turn it into something more. Playing two smart people who are blind to the destructive nature of their infatuations, De Niro and Stone gradually, sometimes affectingly, suggest the fundamental lack of trust that turns this into a marriage from hell.
Pesci has really played this role before, in Scorsese’s “GoodFellas,” for which he won a well-deserved Oscar. But he does it so well here, while adding a few more shadings, that he wipes out the memory of all the bad choices he’s made in the five years since that picture.
Unfortunately, Pesci’s presence also reminds you that Scorsese has covered similar territory more succinctly, while Ace’s marital pigheadedness recalls De Niro’s work in Scorsese’s “Raging Bull.”
Deja vu becomes inevitable, particularly when “Casino” starts repeating itself. You don’t have to have seen any previous Scorsese/De Niro/Pesci movies to wonder if the filmmakers are stuck in a rut.
Around the halfway point, you suspect that you’re not going to get much that you haven’t already seen. There will be more killings, more coke-snorting, more double crosses, more screaming matches between husband and wife - and very little sense of how Vegas changed between the early 1970s and today. It’s not as over-the-top as Brian DePalma’s bloated “Scarface,” but it’s getting there.
The movie wants to be the “Godfather” of modern Las Vegas, expressing Ace’s nostalgia for a time when junk bonds weren’t creating an alternative Disneyland, complete with pyramids and an MGM theme park. But the pop-music soundtrack and the lengthy voiceovers by Ace and Nicky tell us more about this than the filmmakers show.
The script by Scorsese and his “GoodFellas” co-writer, Nicholas Pileggi, is finally too narrowly focused and indulgently structured.
xxxx “Casino” Location: Lincoln Heights, Newport and Showboat cinemas Credits: Directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Sharon Stone, James Woods Running time: 180 minutes Rating: R