Casinos are one of the most popular settings for movies. They offer glamour, excitement and plenty of opportunities for action to take place. Of course, movies do tend to take a little bit of creative license when featuring casinos, so the accuracy can be a little bit off sometimes. We’ve taken a close look at how accurate some of the biggest casino-based movies ever are, so that you know when to suspend your disbelief when watching. Keep reading to learn which movies have been lying to you all of these years.
Casino
Casino is without a doubt a classic movie. It’s based on a true story set during the 1970s. This means that it has a lot of details that were accurate for that time period, but in the modern world aren’t accurate at all. One aspect that’s changed since the time Casino was set in is sports betting. In the modern world, sportsbooks are usually twinned with an online casino or sportsbook. This allows sports betting to be offered both in the venue itself and through a mobile app. This is perhaps a minor change, but it’s something that is relevant to people’s lives today.
The next aspect that has changed to a large degree is the violence that was carried out. In Casino, there are a lot of punishments offered for anything that might be seen as a slight against the Mafia, who were running the casinos at that time. This doesn’t take place in the modern era as casinos are tightly regulated, legitimate businesses. This means that if you are caught counting cards in a casino now, you will be asked to leave, whereas in Casino, this could have led to violence being meted out against you.
Ocean’s 11
This is often a controversial pick for top casino movies. The lackluster sequels mean that the original is dragged down quite a lot. It’s unfair, as the first Ocean’s 11 movie, a remake of a classic Rat Pack movie from the 1960s, is a slick, tight and well-composed heist movie. How accurate is it in relation to a real casino though?
Well, for the most part, it’s quite accurate. Almost all of the scenes that take place in a casino were filmed inside The Bellagio. In fact, the crew took over The Bellagio for a large portion of filming. While this might seem like a poor move from a business standpoint, it actually helped the casino achieve its most successful December ever, as the movie increased hype around the casino.
Although the majority of the movie is very accurate regarding the casino, there is one very big part of Ocean’s 11 that’s not accurate. This is the scene that centers around the vault. Here the accuracy is very low. The reason behind this is that it just couldn’t be accurate.
Firstly, The Bellagio doesn’t have a vault. It obviously has a range of security measures, but nothing on the extravagant scale that Ocean’s 11 shows. The vault was added to the movie to provide some added excitement and the opportunity for a fun scene to take place.
Secondly, it just wouldn’t be practical to show the security at The Bellagio in a movie. Giving away the security protocols and measures that are in place would mean the movie could be used to help real criminals break into the casino.
21
21 is a movie based on the true story of the MIT Blackjack Team. The movie shows the team learning how to count cards and then taking those skills to casinos in order to grab big wins at the blackjack table. As it’s based on a true story, a lot of the casino-based scenes do have high levels of accuracy. While the movie doesn’t actually teach players how to count cards, as that would probably be quite a boring movie due to the complexity that is involved, any details that are shown are accurate.
The one aspect that isn’t accurate is the violence that takes place when one of the team members is discovered to be counting cards. In the real world, they wouldn’t have been beaten up and warned to stay away. It would have just been a case of them being black-listed from casinos.
The real inaccuracies in 21 come from how the characters are depicted. The story of the MIT Blackjack Team isn’t told completely true to life, but with regards to the scenes in casinos, it does have a high level of accuracy in place.
