'Back home, they would lock us up for doing what we're doing,' notes the movie's hero, Sam Rothstein (Robert De Niro). According to the old joke, Vegas is the only place where dissatisfied customers keep coming back, and to the mobsters back East who run the casinos, the gambling business is like a license to steal. 'Casino' presents Vegas as a mobster's dream come true. It's an empty, tedious film - a disappointing, jumbled rehash of brilliant past work. Yes, the filmmaking here is rapturous and virtuosic - as it so often is with Scorsese - but instead of linking up expressively with the movie's themes, his flamboyance merely distracts us from the vacuum at the movie's core. In telling this violent story about a pair of best friends and the woman who comes between them, Scorsese seems to have run out of insights into the amoral scheming of his hood protagonists. But it appears from the evidence here that Scorsese has gone to the well once too often. Based on Nicholas Pileggi's book about the Las Vegas gambling industry, the movie marks the director's return to the Mafia universe he captured so vividly in both his early 'Mean Streets' and the more recent 'GoodFellas' (also based on a Pileggi script). 'Casino' is Martin Scorsese's 17th film and, with the possible exception of 'After Hours,' his least engaging.
