This is all I have on Inception

David Edelstein usually knows what he's talking about so when he panned Inception I took notice of this deficiency in the plot

Cobb accepts the job because he longs to see his two little kids in the U.S. and is forbidden to return on account of a Crime to Be Revealed Later; and Saito says that with one phone call he can make the legal problems go away. (He just can.)

If you assume Chris Nolan is smart and did not take ten years scripting his movie only to ignore glaring problems there must have been some reason Saito could with a single phone call return Cobb to America. There is another instance where Mal reminds Dom that circumnavigating the globe with his gang of jetsetting dream theives is hardly the most logical reality to dwell in. The film was never about Cobb implanting an idea into Cillian Murphy or returning to his kids. The characters were trying to wake up Cobb.