A casino is a building that has been fitted with gambling devices, tables and other games of chance. People come to gamble and hope that Lady Luck will smile on them. In a casino, the odds are in favor of the house. A casino is a business and like any other business the house needs to make money or it will fail.
Unlike his Mafia movies (Mean Streets, Goodfellas) Scorsese is less concerned with plot and more with showing how Vegas is a machine that allows people like Ace Rothstein, Ginger McKenna and Nicky Santoro to thrive in it, then chews them up and spits them out. It is an epic history lesson about a city that was basically minting money in the billions until it was taken over by huge gambling corporations.
It is a long movie – three hours — but it never feels padded. It moves at a breakneck pace and is riveting till the end. The cast is superb and Sharon Stone gives her best performance. She is streetwise, brassy and physically striking as the small-time hustler. Joe Pesci is a formidable force as the mobster who will do anything to survive in Vegas, even if that means selling his soul.
The film’s special effects were accomplished by a team led by Northern California’s Matte World, which once specialized in creating latent image miniature/matte painting hybrid shots for stylized productions such as Batman Returns and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The team adapted these techniques to digital technology for the creation of Casino’s realistic scenes.