He bombards us with so much ”objective” information about his characters that he never quite finds their souls.Sam 'Ace' Rothstein, the consummate bookie who can change the odds merely by placing a bet, has risen through the ranks of the Midwestern mob to be picked by the bosses to front their entree into Vegas. In Casino, he doesn’t just revel in detail he gets addicted to it. Yet the discursive, this-happened-and-this-happened-and-then- this approach that Scorsese employs has a serious drawback. To a degree, the strategy works it creates an almost surgical slice of backroom intrigue. Ace and Nicky are based on the actual underworld figures Frank ”Lefty” Rosenthal and Tony ”the Ant” Spilotro, and throughout the film the two characters narrate the action in relentless, voluble voice-over, explaining how they got there, what they’re doing, and why. Scorsese, re-teaming with his GoodFellas collaborator Nicholas Pileggi, wants to get as far away as possible from conventional melodrama. Las Vegas casinos, at least in the ’70s, practiced a legalized version of what the Mob was already doing, and Casino, with its hypnotic flow of images and information, its vision of Vegas as a laboratory of domesticated sin, is a heady, engrossing experience - for a while. He’s the heart of Casino, but on some level he’s dead before anyone tries to blow him up.

Ace, however, remains what he always was: a control freak, a dourly ”civilized” efficiency expert. And we see him trapped in a lethal dance of wills with longtime pal Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci, doing high-pitched riffs on his GoodFellas persona), a brutal little thug who comes to Vegas for the action and proceeds to terrorize everyone in sight. We see him fall for the boozy, gold-digging hustler Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone), whose declaration that she isn’t in love with him doesn’t deter Ace from marrying her. We see him master the tricks of the trade: how to skim receipts, spot cardsharps, and grease the palms (and more than that) of politicians. Once established, Ace prowls the huge, flashing game room of the Tangiers with the wary omnipotence of a jungle cat, observing the action - observing his life - but seldom getting involved. Technically, he isn’t part of the Mafia, but he has been placed in power by an elite group of Italian-American bosses who trust the numbers guy - the Jew - to up their profits. Ace, who hails from back East, is a legendary gambler, a genius at working the angles. As Casino goes on, we see Ace in better days, as he arrives in Vegas in the early ’70s to rule the roost at the Tangiers, a posh casino-hotel owned by the Mob.

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