Casino.

Probably one of the best Crime drama's out there. I mean this is an all star cast from the old skool. There's Robert Deniro, Joe Pesci, Frank Vincent, and Sharon Stone. If you want to make a gangster film then these guys would be my go to guys. Back in the day though, I mean they are all in their 80's now.

Joe Pesci was a surprise for me. My first viewings of Joe Pesci were watching him in My Cousin Vinny and in Lethal Weapon 3. He was the small harmless and funny guy there. I enjoyed watching those two movies. But damn, when I saw him in the hard hitting Casino then a new persona was born. I had never seen him like this, and it was even crazier that I learned he played Tommy Devito in Goodfellas 5 years previously.

This was my first real introduction to crime drama and boy did I absolutely love it. I actually had zero idea this was the way that organized crime works, even although I was about to join a gang around that time in the real world. It was .. eye opening to say the least. I was only 15 at the time.

But this film surpassed any of the Crime dramas I have seen of late. Nothing has come close at all. Except perhaps some game titles like the Max Payne franchise and the GTA series -- Rockstar Games are really good story tellers that's for sure. I wish there was a game export that did really well to TV, but most have been trash.

This film plays really well to my thirst for action, subterfuge, double agents, and the moneymaking that I like to watch for in films. I've seen this one at least 10 times and I never get bored of it. It's a surprisingly deep take on organized crime and the way everyone goes about their business. How everything runs smoothly when everyone is getting paid, and how people start dying when they are not.

It's a story written about the gangsters back home (Chicago), the Italian outfit that ran the fictional Tangiers Casino in Las Vegas to earn some serious cash. They set up Robert Deniro as the main front for the Tangiers because he was good at crunching numbers and Gambling, and well, he was good at talking his way out of trouble. It's about the meteoric rise of crime in Las Vegas, and the subsequent downfall as almost all of them were quickly policed out.

I wish I could say there was a plot point to this film but it moreso felt like a series of events that happened in time with little plot points intertwining with each other. It ran more like a biography rather than a story.

It's a great film, I must say. The casting was similar to the hit movie five years earlier "Goodfellas" - with a lot of the same cast playing in that film too. And I was shocked at how most of the important cast was offed at the end. Few survived the downfall because there's no way the old bosses back home wanted any information back on them that would put them in prison.

I would recommend it if you're into a bit of greaseball mobster drama like I am. Nothing beats the old movies and how they used to do it -- movie writers just don't have the imagination anymore.

Posted using CineTV