[Editor's Note: Script reviews of upcoming projects have been around for as long as there's been an Internet. Therefore it's no secret that a film can evolve into something quite different from its screenplay. Please keep in mind that this article represents a look at a particular script and not the final product.]
The script, formerly titled Bagman, has been retitled Casino Jack, perhaps in candor or maybe hope, as the structure echoes Martin Scorsese’s masterwork Casino. That film’s narrative structure, the film noir plot which begins near the end, with voice over by the protagonist in an ambiguous time warp, then rewinds to skip around in the plot back to the earlier scene, is replicated in Casino Jack. Such imitation is revealing, as Scorsese’s Casino gives us nothing less than the essence of an era, the golden age of Las Vegas, before it is destroyed by the characters we follow, Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein, Nicky Santoro, Ginger, and the old-time mob, through failures of limits, trust, growth, and awareness, to be overtaken by corporate ownership.
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Casino Jack harbors similar aspirations, the essence of an era, in this case ostensibly the Bush II era. But it is the “Republican Revolution” that Casino Jack targets, and after beginning with the Washington Post exposure and bust of the fictional “Jack Abramoff” and the murder of “Gus Boulis,” we discover the 21 year old Jack rooted in 1980, a college Republican riding in a campaign limo with “Ronald Reagan” himself, who counsels Jack: never surrender; there are no constraints on the human mind; no walls around the human spirit; no barriers to our progress except those we erect ourselves; the family is everything; all great changes in America begins around the dinner table. This is Casino Jack’s foundational Reaganite wisdom, though Reagan will return and give Jack a cryptic warning, too late, about idealism.
This Jack is an agent of smashmouth capitalism. Early on we see him busted in his Gulfstream wearing a $1000 Armani suit. He is the son of a “Rat Pack” former Diners Club president now retired to Palm Springs, raised in Beverly Hills, and has become a superstar Washington lobbyist representing Indian tribes’ gambling interests. Jack also invests, through homeboy “Adam Kidan” (think Joe Pesci’s Nicky Santoro) in Florida offshore gambling boats and owns a fancy restaurant in DC. He represents the Northern Mariana Islands, where his Congressman friend vacations, entertained by a “nubile young Asian woman,” and which manufactures “in the rag trade” under “Made in USA” labels, not subject to US labor law. It is an increasingly murky, tragic saga of greedy Republican financial chicanery. When things unravel, a partner at Jack’s firm compares the whole debacle to Enron. (more…)