Ginger is the wild card, the untrustworthy junkie bitch who brings chaos into the boys' club. Nicky, on the other hand, is a back-home street thug with his eyes on the prize. Power to him means being feared. He doesn't use his head, and after a while the bosses back home start to wonder if he's worth the trouble. Joe Pesci may seem to have already gotten an Oscar for this performance, but Nicky is different from his other psycho, Tommy, in GoodFellas.
Money is serious.
The more you have, the more you have to worry about losing it. The men in Casino have calcified far beyond the Ray Liotta character in GoodFellas, who got off on the sensual pleasures of being a hot-shot. These Vegas men, lured long ago by the siren song of money, have long since crashed on the rocks. Ace derives no pleasure from his grandly successful casino or even from his family. Casino has been criticized for being cold, and unfairly compared with GoodFellas, as if the collaboration of De Niro, Pesci, and Scorsese made it an unofficial sequel.