When ‘Casino’ arrived in UK cinemas in March 1996, I remember feeling that Martin Scorsese was retreating slightly into familiar territory. Once again we have a fact-based crime saga adapted from Nicholas Pileggi, Robert De Niro at the centre and Joe Pesci playing another terrifying gangster who isn’t exactly a million miles away from Tommy DeVito in ‘Goodfellas’.

But this time Scorsese moves from New York to the glittering casinos of Las Vegas, and beneath all the stylistic virtuosity ‘Casino’ is really a film about trust, betrayal and people who simply don’t know when to stop.

Robert De Niro plays Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein, a gambling expert put in charge of the Tangiers casino. Sam understands systems. The casino operates according to rules, probabilities and control. The house always wins.

His great mistake is believing human beings can be managed in the same way.

Sam trusts virtually nobody, yet he falls for Ginger, played brilliantly by Sharon Stone, precisely because she knows how to play the system. We first see her throwing casino chips into the air, completely disrupting the carefully controlled environment around her, and Sam seems almost erotically fascinated by her audacity.

But Ginger comes with a complicated past, including her continuing attachment to the seedy Lester Diamond (James Woods). Sam can give her money, jewellery and security, but somehow it is never enough.

Their marriage therefore becomes another casino.

Everyone is gambling and everyone thinks they can beat the odds.

Ginger believes she has found domestic security, but like so much on the casino floor, it turns out to be counterfeit. Sam can identify somebody cheating at cards from across a room, yet cannot recognize – or perhaps refuses to recognize – the instability inside his own marriage.

That’s where ‘Casino’ differs significantly from ‘Goodfellas’. Henry Hill’s story is effectively a coming-of-age narrative. A young man discovers an intoxicating version of the American Dream, climbs the ladder and gradually disappears into a moral vortex.

Sam is already middle-aged and successful.

There is nowhere left for him to climb, and so the question is whether he can hold onto what he has.

Scorsese nevertheless deliberately echoes ‘Goodfellas’. That film’s celebrated Copacabana tracking shot takes us through the kitchen and into a world where everything magically falls Henry’s way. Doors open, tables appear and ordinary rules don’t apply.

‘Casino’ offers its own equivalent by showing how money is skimmed from the Tangiers and eventually makes its way back to the mob in Kansas City. The casino’s glamorous public face conceals an elaborate criminal machine.

The irony is that these people are obsessed with enforcing rules while constantly breaking them themselves.

Sam demands absolute consistency. The ludicrous scene in which he instructs the chef to put exactly the same number of blueberries into every muffin tells us almost everything about him. His universe must be controlled down to the individual blueberry.

Elsewhere that control becomes horrifying. Hands are smashed and heads placed in vices because somebody has violated the rules of an organisation which itself exists outside the law.

Joe Pesci’s Nicky Santoro embodies the danger of excess. Like Ginger, he cannot recognize boundaries. The mob gives him protection, but instead of appreciating that protection he continually pushes against the people providing it.

Everyone in ‘Casino’ eventually makes the same mistake.

They attract too much attention.

Sam does it particularly spectacularly when the gambling authorities threaten his position. Instead of remaining discreet, he launches a television show and publicly attacks the regulators.

For somebody operating inside an enormous criminal enterprise, going on television is perhaps not the wisest strategy.

But that is the tragedy of these characters. They become so intoxicated by power, money and transgression that they lose the ability to stop themselves.

In that sense, ‘Casino’ is fundamentally a film about greed.

Not simply financial greed, but the inability to accept enough.

Ginger has wealth but wants something else. Nicky has protection but wants greater power. Sam has the casino but wants public legitimacy and recognition. Their desires continually expand until the structures which enabled their success can no longer contain them.

It becomes almost a study of sin: temptation followed by transgression, excess and ultimately punishment.

That makes the ending particularly interesting. As in ‘Goodfellas’, we eventually leave the glamorous criminal world behind and encounter something much more mundane. Sam laments the disappearance of the old Vegas, replaced by something corporate, legitimate and effectively Disneyfied.

There is almost a sense of paradise lost.

Except this paradise was corrupt from the beginning.

So perhaps ‘Casino’ presents an inverted Fall. Its characters look nostalgically back at a supposedly golden age which involved organized crime, brutality, exploitation and murder. The innocence they mourn never actually existed.

And yet I do have reservations about the film.

At three hours, ‘Casino’ is an extraordinarily long journey through territory Scorsese has explored before, and there are moments when the virtuosity of the filmmaking becomes more interesting than the story underneath it. The camera is constantly moving, the editing is propulsive, the soundtrack relentless and the voiceovers continually driving us through another layer of corruption.

Scorsese can hardly normally be accused of putting style before substance, but here I occasionally felt the style drawing attention to itself.

Perhaps that is appropriate in Las Vegas, a city constructed around spectacle, surfaces and excess. ‘Casino’ itself almost behaves like one of its casinos: dazzling us with lights, movement and noise until we lose track of how long we’ve been inside.

Ultimately, ‘Casino’ is about people who win and keep gambling. They have money, influence, protection and power, but none of them knows when to walk away from the table.

And in a casino, that is precisely how the house eventually wins.