Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
Studio: Warrior Poets, Wild Bunch, Non-Linear Films
Rated: PG-13
Release Date: 2008-04-18
Director: Morgan Spurlock
WorkNameSort: Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?

In Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? director Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) is a posse of one.

His quest? To track down the War on Terror’s poster boy, Osama bin Laden. Unfortunately for Spurlock, the comedian-on-a-quest schtick inaugurated by Michael Moore in Roger & Me has begun to wear thin. As the Iraq War enters its fifth year, the mugging, Borat-baiting approach to Bush-era incompetence has become less and less a source of hilarity.

Always foregrounding himself, Spurlock sets up his thesis. With a new baby on the way, keeping the world safe from terrorists is more crucial than ever. The “hook” for Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? is Operation Special Delivery. Like George Bush’s abortive quest for Osama, Spurlock’s snipe hunt comes with its own time frame and agenda. In this case, the time frame is a nine-month gestation. And the agenda? Comedy.

A guileless, good-guy American in this War-on-Terror for Dummies, Spurlock skips around the globe to an increasingly hostile series of locales, from Egypt to Afghanistan to Pakistan, asking shopkeepers and scholars if they know where Public Enemy No. 1 is hiding.

Like Moore, Spurlock uses politics as his straight man to set up some carefully crafted funny business. Some of the humor, though, tends to stick in the throat, like Spurlock golly-geeing over a Saudi Arabian public execution site. Spurlock is especially fond of the sight gag, as when his efforts to penetrate the censorship-prone Saudi Arabian mindset cues a shot of Spurlock ascending from a shopping mall escalator dressed in full “undercover” thobe and ghutra. In less comic moments, Spurlock is assaulted by irate Orthodox Jews who resent his presence in their Israeli neighborhood. “Dude!” Spurlock protests when one bearded grandfather-type body-checks him, sounding very much like the naive American he is, astounded at the tension that divides the Middle East.

In comparison to Moore, Spurlock is the more likable Everyman, yet it is Moore’s comic timing and sense of outrage that make his docs such incendiary entertainments. Spurlock’s shifts from goofy to solemn are less graceful. In a moment of questionable taste during a stop in Afghanistan, Spurlock sounds like Vince Vaughn on his first world tour, joking about “guys busy playing with their nuts” of the Afghan soldiers he accompanies into the mountains, shaking trees for the kind of sustenance Americans take for granted.

Spurlock ends his film with the hardly earth-shattering epiphany that people in the Middle East, from the Palestinians contending with a demoralizing security wall to the Afghans attending school in bombed-out buildings, really aren’t so bad.

Torn between a desire to enlighten and entertain, Spurlock more often goes for the funny bone. In Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?, political outrage has degenerated into an extended comic stunt.

This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2008.