Another story about the rise and fall of a gangsters brings us Billy Tan's CASINO. Giant (Simon Yam) is the man who tells us his story in flashbacks. How he and his buddy started as small fishes in the pool of Yakuza sharks and how they took over the important casinos in Macau. Giant doesn't want a war between the Yakuza groups he furthermore offers his rivals to share the profit but when Giant's men are beaten up badly it seems that there's no way to avoid trouble. And of course Giant is a gambler who loves to risk everything in the last game - power is important and so his wife suffers from this attitude. And when his friend Liu is diagnosed with lung cancer it seems the luck is gone...

What you could expect of that movie is some good action scenes with guns and some hot gambling. But it doesn't happen. Therefor lots of streetfighting with over 30 people is present and all the guys are beaten up frequently. Guns are not as important and so the fighting scenes are not as different. So the violence level isn't as high as you would expect for a cat. III rating. The story doesn't push forward and there's no real climax at the end. In a word: disappointing. Maybe they just tried to rip off Scorsese's CASINO.

DVD (Mei Ah, NTS, Codefrei)

This time Mei Ah has done a better job with the interactive menu. Indeed there is one and there are 3 trailers as extra material (there's one trailer which is really disgusting and that alone would count for a Cat. III rating). The movie itself is presented in approx. 1.85:1 format with a 5.1 Dolby audio track. But the audio track isn't really good. As usual there's no insert card available with the DVD. You can choose between three subtitles (simplified chinese, traditional chinese, english), so this time removable subs. Of course there's no regional coding.