It’s telling us that this is something else, a different face of crime. But the kind of excess and spectacle presented in Casino blows that all away, at least in terms of scale. Crime films are a familiar territory for Scorsese and you can see a lot of the same elements that made films like Goodfellas (1990) and Mean Streets (1973) critical successes. This is the story of a tragedy and the movie is about how the characters got there. From the very beginning, you could already tell that everything is gonna go up in flames by the end of this movie.
