I'm always flabbergasted when I watch a film and then my immediate reaction is: ''well that's exactly what I thought it would be.''
This is a beat for Beat Noir film with romantic undertones. It follows the life of a sloppy guy whose job it is to kill winning streaks and bring the general mood of a casino down.
He makes sure that no matter how well you're doing at the game you'll end up leaving the casino with nothing more than the dick in your hand.
That is until he meets a cocktail waitress who he takes a fancy to. At some point she ends up hooking up with a guy and his luck turns around and somehow this man's luck turning around altars the luck of everyone around him.
It's the only odd part of the entire film.
Lady Luck is a very real thing in this universe and this man has a direct link to it.
Everything he's around including himself is affected by this Aura of negativity.
Sometimes it's really small like a container of cream being empty.
But then other times it's something incredibly large like falling a hundred thousand dollars in debt and getting your knees smashed in or giving $3,000 to your deadbeat son so that he can blow it at a casino with cheap dice rolling tricks and than watching as he gets his leg busted after the casino manager reveals to our schlubby protagonist that he and his 'supposedly' pregnant wife are nothing more than a bunch of two-bit hustlers.
80% of this movie is just following the antics of this one guy. While another 20% follows the escapades of his manager a guy known as Sully who runs the casino. He's this old piece of Mafia Antiquity who wants to keep his business firmly locked in the 1970s. With everything from Old School crooner performances to hiring ''cool-down guys'' to alter the tables at the casino. It's both his greatest strength and his weakness. As he ends up fighting with half of his own Associates to keep his little world from crumbling around him. And the film doesn't seem to know if it wants us to sympathise with a guy or snarl at him.
Overall it's a fairly decent film but it feels about 10 years out of date. In a way the film kind of worked with that angle as the whole thing feels like the dying age of the film Casino finally coming to its final position.
This is the kind of movie that makes me question my position on franchise films. I've been very vocal over the years as somebody who doesn't like formulaic movies. (You know the genres. There's a big massive Hollywood Productions that are made right now, that have so many people overlooking the project that you wonder why they even bother having a director to begin with.)
But then I sit here watching 20 different Casino movies, various western films and more detective movies then I could possibly know what to do with. They all pretty much have the same formulaic structure.
And I've come to the conclusion that if I continue to bad-mouth certain films just because of their orientation into a certain genre film, I may come off as a hypocrite. So I'm going to try and alter my opinions and all this stuff.
And I can just badmouth these committee made action films for being something that I really don't have an interest in.
I'll still maintain that they're formulaic and that I shouldn't like it for that, but I'll quietly sit down and acknowledge other people's rights to enjoy them especially given my interest in films like that.
Really I'm just happy that this movie ended with a positive romantic angle. every other Casino movie I've ever seen involving some sort of relationship either ends in Bloodshed or is the fundamental reason for why everything fell apart to begin with. Here it's the reason everything became better. And even at its most weekend depressing moment it still looked upon as the one thing Worth Fighting For.
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