"Eh...Why Take a Chance?"
Casino is a great movie...a quasi-remake of GoodFellas to be sure, but with its own tone and style -- it got a bigger budget than GoodFellas and is more grand.
But both movies find Martin Scorsese eventually moralizing against the high life of big money and unlimited personal power that gangsters -- and their business associates -- enjoy.
In Casino, we have the darkly comic moment when a bunch of old gangsters -- in wheelchairs and on oxygen for "show" during their trials -- confer about what to do about their extremely loyal, extremely well-performing underlings.
Says the main old boss(who, with his buddies, probably doesn't have all that many years left anyway, but survival is king at all ages):
"Eh...why take a chance?"
Whereupon Scorsese launches into the raw carnage and merciless killings that an old man's shrugged-off decision has wrought: down goes Alan King's teamster boss(probably the "easiest" killing; like, say Tony Soprano maybe, he doesn't know what hit him when he is shot in the head from behind and above); and the skim room runner(being chased around his sunny and opulent Costa Rica hideway and executed on the spot by two middle-aged guys in track suits); some guy brutally killed by his car window and a plastic bag over the head; and climactically, Joe Pesci and his brother(the most savage of executions, via baseball bat and burial while alive; surprisingly carried out with unexpected glee by Pesci's former "assistant," Frank Vincent).
The message is clear and direct and far more "moral" than what did or did not happen to Tony Soprano -- mob work is high reward..but very high risk.
We also get Sharon Stone's "unrelated" death by a bad drug overdose fitted into the final slaughter -- but she, too, pays for her sins. And is pretty much dead broke at the time, after years of fabulous wealth.
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Casino spends a great lot of "non-GoodFellas" time on the casino business and how it works; on the interrelationship of "out of towners versus Nevada cowboys" in the world of political power, and on the semi-comic downfall of a preening egotist(DeNiro) who loses it all on the basis of firing some connected idiot and marrying a hooker-cum-scam artist but...
....it all comes down to Life and Death with the Mob at the end.
The final cascade of mob executions in Casino links the film up directly to the cascade of murders ordered by DeNiro in "GoodFellas" against a "more guilty and less loyal" group of criminal associates(he told them not to spend their robbery money in too flashy a way), but both films indicate that in the mob world, you are subject to the paranoiac whims of your criminal overseers. Have fun, spend the dough, and screw the beauties while you can because(in Scorsese's view, if not so much in real life)...the bill will come due.