Casino begins with a bang and ends not so much with a whimper as with more than two hours of shrieking and gabbing. It's 1980 and Las Vegas Casino mogul Sam "Ace" Rothstein (Robert De Niro), resplendent in his color-coordinated hot-pink sports jacket, shoes, and tie, climbs into his Caddy, turns the ignition, and explodes. It's a prolonged, lushly slow-motion explosion, and Rothstein leisurely flies across the opening credits as he begins to tell us, presumably in posthumous Billy Wilder-style flashback, how it all happened.

First, though: what's the deal with Scorsese and these ponderous voiceover narratives? Why is the most visually gifted filmmaker in America resorting to spoken words to tell his stories? With the exception of Cape Fear - which maybe could have used a voiceover - every movie he's made this decade has employed what is commonly regarded as a cinematic crutch. It worked in Goodfellas - barely. The characters and concept of the film carried the device and made it integral. In The Age of Innocence it worked no better than anything else in the movie. In Casino you just want these annoying, clueless, inarticulate knuckleheads to shut up.

Maybe the problem lies with the source. Nicholas Pileggi, who authored Wiseguy and collaborated with Scorsese in the movie adaptation Goodfellas, apparently wrote the book the film Casino was based on at the same time he co-wrote the screenplay. It's a unique experiment that, to judge from the results, should not be repeated. Both works are a jumble of notes - one written, the other read - that are sometimes brilliantly illustrated. Areas of vague focus emerge, and they resemble themes that Scorsese has explored with far more clarity and conviction in the past.

The real story, as Pileggi relates it in the book, is sordid, brutal, complicated, and largely pointless. Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal - Rothstein in the movie - was a brilliant Chicago bookie and oddsmaker who made a mint for the mob and ended up running the Stardust and other Casinos in Las Vegas for them. But Rosenthal brought baggage from Chicago with him - Tony "The Ant" Spilotro (portrayed in the movie, inevitably, by Joe Pesci as Nicky Santoro), Frank's boyhood friend, a psychopathic homunculus whose yearning for the big time is matched only by his ability to fuck up big time.

Rosenthal seeks to avoid this dark double from his past. Neither he nor the viewer can; Pesci joins in the voiceover in a kind of fugue of assholes. When Rosenthal is smitten by Geri McGee (named Ginger McKenna on screen, played by Sharon Stone in a performance that galvanizes the movie despite its worst inclinations) - a beautiful, treacherous, self-destructive, multiply addicted hustler - the conflict between the two men erupts.

Like Vegas itself, Rosenthal's story is a pastiche and vulgarization of various American dreams, all derivative from other movies: there's a bit of Scorsese's Mean Streets, Raging Bull, and even King of Comedy (Rosenthal/Rothstein at one point starts his own Casino-based talk show, a grotesque, regrettably abbreviated segment that hilariously combines the stand-up acts of Rupert Pupkin and Jake LaMotta); some of Hawks's, and De Palma's Scarface; a lot of Levinson's Bugsy and, of course, Coppola's The Godfather. Scorsese covers them all like bad bets, larding them over with his characteristic stylistics. There's the hip, period soundtrack, sounding more like a neighbor's overloud radio than poignant counterpoint. There's the frantic precision of the editing, though here it's all technique and no illumination. And, of course, there is the violence - but even Pesci crushing a guy's head in a vise is neither shocking nor funny.

More shocking is Pesci in a love scene with Sharon Stone; they smooch and he shoves her face into his lap. It's indicative of how the film treats Stone's best performance to date. As Ginger, she's the female equivalent of Nicolas Cage's doomed drunk in Leaving Las Vegas. Whether upending a highroller's tray of chips or ramming her Mercedes repeatedly into her husband's El Dorado or tearfully apologizing on the phone to her pimp boyfriend Lester (James Woods) in the middle of her wedding reception, she's the embodiment of an utter, transcendent need for instant gratification. What compels her? We never find out because neither Rothstein nor Scorsese will let her speak. Ceaselessly, and without saying anything, the guys do all the talking in Casino.

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