Scorsese lets the Goodfellas style overwhelm any substance.

Rating: Null/10 (23 September 2002)

I have not yet seen the last hour of this movie - it's sitting on a video tape at home. But last night I sat through the first two hours, and although I wasn't bored, I was reviewing what I had seen in my mind, and frankly it didn't add up to much, really. It was almost the same rags-to-whacking-people-to-riches-to-whacking-each-other-to-rags story of Goodfellas, without the sense of humour.
More seriously, for Scorsese as a filmmaker, was the absence of any real involvement in the relationships between the characters. Why Ace and Nicky are best friends is never really explored - all we really see between them is animosity. Sharon Stone is a beautiful woman, but I was hoping to see something more to indicate exactly why it was Rothstein fell in love with Ginger, other than him telling us so. The line about trust at the very start of the film is important, but never really seems to be followed up, as it is clear that not only did Rothstein not trust his wife from day one, he was never given the remotest reason to. Ginger's obsession with riches and jewellry is demonstrated, but never explored, other than perhaps to indicate that she had no taste in jewellry!
I could see absolutely no reason for this movie to be as long as it was, except that it included a lot of scenes that, made by a different director, would have ended up on the cutting room floor. The whole sequence about the bosses getting annoyed about being skimmed from their skim, to the KC operator moaning about his expenses, to his mouthing off to his parents in the Kansas store, was an utter waste of time (and the faux-reality acting of the mother complaining about his swearing, was a major change in style which only served to jerk you out of the movie you were watching.)
Scorsese made his name by handling different films with different styles, but still making them inimitably his own: Mean Streets is different from Taxi Driver, is different from Raging Bull, is different from The Color Of Money, is different from Goodfellas. Not many directors have sustained such diversity and originality over 20 years. But Casino lacks the originality of its predecessors, and it lacks the emotional heart which is essential to any good film.