His short stature and wide build may seem like an aversion to the archetype, but Pesci makes it clear that Nicky means business. In Casino, Pesci compellingly shifts between the role of loyal, sympathetic friend and unhinged, wrathful gangster. Joe Pesci is the face that you imagine when you’re thinking “mob enforcer” and his portrayal of made man Nicky Santoro in this film solidifies the niche he found playing mobsters in The Death Collector (1976) and GoodFellas (1990). And yet, with De Niro’s inherent charm and comfortably with the character, he convincingly plays a guy who you shouldn’t be able to sympathize with, and yet you do.

Not the most awful in the film, mind you, but he’s not a nice guy. Robert de Niro as criminal casino executive Sam Rothstein is frighteningly cold and calculated, but with a cool and confident swagger to him. The back-and-forth between Sam and Nicky is both entertaining and enlightening, especially since the narration is always coupled with stunningly captivating scenes of both the glitz and glam of Las Vegas and the criminal underbelly of the city. The first 30 or so minutes of film is heavily narrated, and narration also plays a large part of the story telling process throughout the film. It’s a kind of exhibition of profusion that we won’t be seeing again from Scorsese until his 2013 comedy/crime epic The Wolf of Wall Street.ĭespite my usual distaste for exposition, Scorsese is definitely the kind of director who knows how to the narrative device tastefully and his use of it in this film is no different. It’s telling us that this is something else, a different face of crime. But the kind of excess and spectacle presented in Casino blows that all away, at least in terms of scale. Crime films are a familiar territory for Scorsese and you can see a lot of the same elements that made films like Goodfellas (1990) and Mean Streets (1973) critical successes. This is the story of a tragedy and the movie is about how the characters got there.

From the very beginning, you could already tell that everything is gonna go up in flames by the end of this movie.

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