One thing I missed about the court hearing (SPOILERS)

I get that you're one of those people that gets the self worth from feeling inferior to a bunch of words on a computer screen, and I respect that. Some people need that since their lives are so sad. I won't judge. But quit being such an uppity *beep*. No it wasn't important to the story, no I don't care whether it made sense or not, which it didn't. And I've already come up with something in my brain, without your help, as to how this happened. But it was still a rather stupid and poorly conceived plot device. It would have nice if we knew a little bit about how such out of left field but totally relevant to the story thing came to be. As has been pointed out, it was Thanksgiving.

The journey was terrible...the trip was alright

"If you cannot possibly imagine one of them making a fake phone call off-camera..."

This sort of condescending attitude is simply not justified. The movie failed to provide an explanation for a highly improbable event. Simply claiming that the audience needs to use their imagination is a cop-out.

Nobody is having trouble imagining someone making a phone call. What they're having trouble with is the notion that it would be that simple to trick multiple federal officials and a high-powered attorney into thinking a hearing was scheduled for Thanksgiving day.

"How was it stupid or poorly conceived? It worked, didn't it?"
But it SHOULDN'T have worked. And what was the 'it' that worked? And why did it work? We're never given an explanation for why such an unusual schedule change would be blindly accepted by everyone involved.

A fake phone call, fax, email, or whatever is just not good enough to account for this. Court schedules do get rearranged, but notifications come through official channels, not random phone calls from strangers, and a meeting on a holiday would not be something they would just blindly accept. Lawyers and federal agents don't arrange their schedules based on twitter feeds, text messages, or emails from random hotmail accounts.

If the movie had taken five seconds to mention that the law student had worked as a clerk for the judge in the case, for example, that is all it would have taken to make this somewhat plausible, and my guess is there may have been something like that which got edited out. As it is, it's just ridiculous.

"Sure, it would have been nice to have been spoon-fed the answer, but it was not at all needed or important to the plot."

Let me offer you a counter-example. The movie made a point of having Enrique steal Charlie's wife's phone so they could use it to fake a call to Charlie. In order to do this, they had Enrique ride the subway at the same time as Charlie's wife so he could steal it.

How did Josh know that Charlie's wife would be on the subway? Because Josh was her sister.
And how did Enrique know how to recognize Charlie's wife?
Because they showed Josh giving him a photo of her.

And why did Josh have a photo of her? Again, because she was his sister. And how did we know that she was his sister? Because that was established early in the movie with a couple of seconds of dialog.

Now Why did the movie bother to present all these little facts? Because they were trying to establish credibility. They took actors and cameras into a subway and filmed a scene with Enrique stealing the phone, and the ONLY reason for doing that was to explain part of the plot. Explaining how things happen is part of filmmaking.

The problem is, the whole court hearing on Thanksgiving day thing was a major plot point which was NOT explained at all.

And no, complaining about this weakness in the plot does not mean we want to be 'spoon-fed'. It means we don't want the filmmakers to insult our intelligence by assuming we're too dumb to notice the problem.