When you enter a casino, it’s easy to get caught up in the twinkly lights and jubilant sound of slots and tables. However, most people don’t realize that casinos are designed to make you spend money and crave coming back even when the odds are against you. Casinos use design, psychology and scent to create a manufactured blissful experience that keeps you gambling the night away.
In Casino, Sharon Stone plays Ginger McKenna, a young, blond hustler who personifies Sin City. Her sexy, opportunistic nature makes her an attractive and desirable partner for Sam Rothstein (Robert De Niro), the mafia mogul who runs the Tangiers casino in Las Vegas. Sam hires Ginger to help him skim money from the casinos and run his rackets.
With its bravura set pieces and a cinematographer who gives the movie a lunar scale, Casino is a dazzling entertainment. But beneath the surface, the movie is a cautionary tale about how casinos are rigged to cheat the players.
This is Scorsese’s most violent film, and he doesn’t hold back on the brutality. Scenes of violence abound, from the torture of a man with a vice to the murder of Joe Pesci by a sniper and the death by overdose of Stone’s character. But while the film is shocking in many ways, Scorsese doesn’t resort to violence for shock value or style. His use of it is more like a civic portrait of institutional systems of grift.