Casino (Martin Scorsese)

Rating: 1.5

Yes, you read that rating correctly.  Three hours long, this tedious 
reworking of GOODFELLAS feels like six, maybe eight; it's Scorsese on 
automatic pilot, mindlessly doling out the requisite profanity, brutal 
violence, and virtuoso tracking shots, to no purpose whatsoever.  The 
first couple of reels held my attention, and a sequence depicting the 
discovery of a couple of blackjack hustlers is vivid and exciting, but 
the rest of the picture is a crashing bore, and the nonstop parallels 
to the incomparably superior GOODFELLAS don't help matters at all.  De 
Niro does De Niro; Pesci overdoes Pesci; Sharon Stone, with no character 
to play, does nothing more interesting than she's done in numerous other 
lousy films (I'm tempted to blame this entire fiasco on her, which would 
be unfair but cathartic).  Eventually the whole thing degenerated into a 
prolonged shouting match that left me with a headache and no idea why I'd 
been asked to endure 180 minutes of meaningless drivel.  I didn't like it.