The city of Las Vegas and its casinos have inspired filmmakers looking to inject excitement and intrigue into their movies. The most famous movie with a Las Vegas backdrop is 1960’s ‘Ocean’s Eleven’, where the members of the original ‘Rat Pack’ – Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis – plan to rob five of the top casinos in Las Vegas in a single night. Things were going accordingly planned – at least until after the heists.
‘Ocean’s Eleven’ was remade successfully in 2001 by Steven Soderburgh, with George Clooney in the leading role of Danny Ocean and Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Elliott Gould as gang members, amongst others. The 2001 version updated the storyline while still putting across the same glamorous image of Vegas as in the first movie.
Matt Damon is Mike McDermott, one of the world’s best poker players in the 1998 film ‘Rounders’, who has given up the game in order to concentrate on finishing law school. When his old friend Worm (Edward Norton) is released from prison, he persuades McDermott to return to the game in order to pay off some bad debts he’s accrued. McDermott consequently finds himself playing in a series of poker games where the stakes are forever increasing and the tension is forever building.
Finally, a list of casino movies is incomplete without a mention of the 1995 Martin Scorcese movie ‘Casino’, which is considered by many to be the definitive casino film. This tells the true story of Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein, a mobster who moves to Las Vegas and becomes the operator of the Tangiers casino. Robert De Niro makes the lead role his own, as Rothstein copes with marriage to a drug addict (played by Sharon Stone) and friendship with Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci), a fellow mobster slowly spiraling into a world of violence.