Who knew that Canadian casinos even existed before the release of The Last Casino in 2004? Directed by Canadian cinematographer, Pierre Gill, this $5m-budget movie is very similar to that of the 2008 movie 21, which featured mathematics students using their brains to overcome the margins of the casino floors and was arguably one of Kevin Spacey’s best Hollywood on-screen performances.
It’s a similar case in The Last Casino, as a maths professor, Doug Barnes, played by Charles Martin Smith, recruits a crack team of maths whizz-kids to help him continue to beat the game of blackjack by card counting. Barnes is caught counting cards by a pit boss. As it is frowned upon in casinos around the world, he is promptly blacklisted to play in any local casino. With bills to pay and people owed money, Barnes searches high and low at the university he teaches to pinpoint possible team members of his team.
Students come to Barnes’ rescue
Three particular students catch Barnes’ eye: George, a boy capable of memorizing pi 70 units beyond the decimal point; Scott, who came through a recent memorization test with flying colours; and Elyse, a waitress who also boasts an exceptional memory and ability to retain information having been tested by Barnes himself for a takeaway pizza. Barnes convinces the trio that the plan to move the odds in their favour when playing blackjack has little risk on their part and begins to teach them how to count cards at the tables.
Once the students not only learn how to count cards but also handle the pressure of playing on the casino floor, they are ready to head to the casinos throughout Ontario and Quebec, armed with $1,000 each from Barnes to test the water and determine how much they can win back. The drama element to this film is that Barnes then tells the students about the amount of debt he has racked up to a local gangster, who has asked for repayment of his debts in full within a week. This heaps substantial pressure on the shoulders of the whizz-kids, who just a few days earlier were minding their own business and focusing hard on their university studies.
The Last Casino doesn’t have much of the glitz and glamour that one would expect from a casino-themed movie. There’s no bells and whistles like the Bellagio fountains or the big fight nights at the MGM Grand that you see in the Ocean’s Eleven trilogy, but what it does provide is an engaging storyline with Barnes’ personal demons at the core of the plot.
It doesn’t offer us anything that we’ve not seen before, but it’s entertaining enough to see it through to the bitter end.
The Last Casino in 2018: what would it look like?
A lot has changed in the Canadian casino industry since 2004. The iGaming scene has taken hold worldwide, with Statista revealing that the global online casino market was worth over $47bn in 2017 and is expected to be worth almost $60bn by the turn of the next decade. That pattern of growth appears to be felt in Canada too, with the Canadian Gaming Association confirming gross output of online gaming at $31bn. So, if Pierre Gill was to do this all over again and direct The Last Casino from scratch in 2018, what would the film look like?
It would almost certainly feature online blackjack, with many online casinos for Canadian players now offering substantial welcome bonuses to utilise at the tables upon sign-up that Barnes could give to his students. There is a great review to read about the 888casino site, which offers live streamed blackjack games and could be used as part of the film instead of the team of card counters having to enter a bricks-and-mortar casino. The tension on the 2018-version of The Last Casino would surround whether the human dealers detect that their online players are bending the system.
In Canada today, the government now allows each territory or province to decide its own gambling regulations. Quebec boasts the longest-standing iGaming jurisdiction in Canada and became the first province to accept licenses to operators from around the world. As yet, other Canadian states are yet to follow their example but, given its growth as a ten-figure industry, it’s only a matter of time before iGaming becomes as commonplace for Canadians as a visit to a land-based casino floor.
