Movies Like Casino

Frequently asked about Casino

Common questions people search for, with answers written by us at MoviesPack.

• Why does Nicky Santoro's behavior become a problem for the mob bosses?▾

  Nicky was sent to Vegas to protect Ace Rothstein and the mob's skim operation, but he quickly built his own independent crew and ran a string of burglaries, robberies, and murders that drew heavy attention from the FBI and local police. His name in the Black Book got him banned from every casino, and his recklessness, combined with his affair with Ace's wife Ginger, made him a liability the bosses could no longer tolerate. By the end, the bosses decide he has to be eliminated to stop the bleeding.

• What actually happens to Nicky and his brother Dominick at the end?▾

  Nicky and Dominick are lured to a cornfield in Indiana under the pretense of a sit-down meeting to smooth things over. Instead, Frankie Marino and the rest of their own crew ambush them, beating both brothers nearly to death with aluminum baseball bats. They are then buried alive in a shallow grave in the cornfield, a punishment ordered by the bosses for the heat Nicky brought down on the operation.

• How does Ginger die, and was it murder or an accident?▾

  After fleeing Las Vegas with the key to Ace's safe deposit box, Ginger ends up in a seedy Los Angeles motel, where hustlers drug her, steal her money and jewelry, and leave her for dead. The film presents her death as a drug overdose rather than an outright hit, the natural endpoint of her spiraling addiction and the company she kept. Ace narrates that she was found dead with only a few dollars left from the fortune she escaped with.

• Why does Ace Rothstein fire Don Ward, the slot manager, and why does it backfire so badly?▾

  Ace fires Ward after a rigged slot scam pays out three jackpots in a row on machines Ward was supervising, which Ace correctly identifies as an inside job he should have caught. The problem is that Ward is the brother-in-law of a powerful county commissioner with deep political connections in Nevada. The commissioner retaliates by pushing the gaming board to deny Ace's license, which becomes the formal mechanism that ends Ace's reign over the Tangiers.

• What is the significance of the car bomb that opens the film?▾

  The film opens with Ace getting into his Cadillac and being thrown skyward by a car bomb, then loops back to tell the story leading up to that moment. He survives only because a metal plate under the driver's seat of that particular model deflected the blast, a detail Ace notes was pure luck. The bombing represents the mob bosses' attempt to clean house and tie up loose ends along with Nicky's elimination, marking the violent collapse of the old Vegas they all built.