Life doesn't fit into the skeptics' neat little packages of plausibility.

Rating: 8/10 (17 September 2007)

To all of these people who want to rant about how completely unrealistic it was for Costello to trust Costigan--life usually doesn't work itself out so neatly. Stop analyzing movies frame by frame, assuming that cheap skepticism lends superiority or some other assumed virtue.
First off, it's a movie. A really good one. Second, it's a far cry from stupid action flicks where lone strongmen storm armed fortresses.
Finally, you can't put human behavior in your dumb little test tube. Just as one parallel example, here's a quote from Wikipedia considering the demise of Jesse James: "With his gang depleted by arrests, deaths, and defections, Jesse thought he had only **two men left whom he could trust**: brothers Bob and Charley Ford. Charley had been out on raids with Jesse before, but Bob was an **eager new recruit.** To better protect himself, Jesse asked the Ford brothers to move in with him and his family. Little did he know that Bob Ford had been conducting secret negotiations with Thomas T. Crittenden, the Missouri governor, to bring in Jesse James." (asterisk emphasis added)