Plenty of folks have a talent for stating the patently obvious, but it takes a particularly toxic blend of chutzpah and self-regard to transform “Duh!” into a high-profile documentary career. Four years ago, Morgan Spurlock’s toothless assault on the fast-food industry, Super Size Me, somehow managed to dazzle audiences with the startling revelation that eating at McDonald’s three times a day, every day, might just possibly be detrimental to one’s health. (The deuce you say!) The film’s success surely had much to do with the masochistic stunt at its center, which found Spurlock gradually transforming himself into a pasty, depressive blob over the course of a telescoped month, but it’s clear that the dude now fashions himself a celebrity gadfly à la Michael Moore. His second feature, Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?, finds Spurlock focusing his squeegee-sharp gaze on the heady and complex subject of Islamic terrorism, drawing conclusions so thunderingly banal that they properly belong in needlepoint. There may be worse movies out there right now, but none so utterly and dispiritingly pointless.
By the way, give Michael Moore some credit: He may be a tireless self-promoter, but at least he doesn’t use family members as a cheap emotional hook. Where in the World opens in Spurlock’s Manhattan apartment, where he informs us that he and his vegan-chef wife, also seen in Super Size Me, are expecting their first child. Consequently, he’ll be spending the next several months attending Lamaze classes and buying baby furniture, and simply won’t have time to make a movie. No, wait, sorry, that actually makes sense. Instead, he decides that he must protect his spawn-to-be from future terrorist attacks, and so leaves his pregnant wife alone, with only a camera crew for company, while he sets out to apprehend bin Laden himself. All of this is tongue-in-cheek, needless to say—it’s clear that Spurlock doesn’t actually expect to succeed where the U.S. military has failed for seven years. But I’ll be damned if I can figure out what he does expect to accomplish, apart from securing a second major item for his résumé.
The desperation shows. I’m all for injecting some fun and liveliness into nonfiction filmmaking, but Spurlock’s pop-culture pandering here is both embarrassingly needy and shamelessly crass. Incredibly, he almost manages to make you feel a little sorry for bin Laden, who’s introduced doing an animated hip-hop dance routine to “U Can’t Touch This” and then winds up battling a goofy Spurlock avatar in video-game format for the duration of the opening credits. That kind of juvenile posturing is fine for an episode of South Park—where it will also benefit from actually being funny—but as the film embarks on a whirlwind tour of various war-torn Muslim countries, from Egypt to Afghanistan to Pakistan, the constant sniggering (Spurlock into mouth of random cave: “Yoo-hoo? Osaaaaama?”) begins to feel a tad obscene. “Why do these people hate us so much?” this self-consciously ugly American wants to know; by so callously juxtaposing the abject with the frivolous, he more or less answers his own question.
Of course, the average Muslim doesn’t despise the average American, whatever his/her (often legitimate) beef with U.S. foreign policy. But there’s no “of course” about it to Spurlock, who spends the entirety of Where in the World discovering, over and over again, that people in the Middle East are ordinary folks trying to make ends meet, just like you and me. If you just gasped aloud, or had to reread the previous sentence several times in disbelief, consider yourself part of this film’s target audience. But for those already well-aware that there are no countries out there entirely populated by Evildoers, there’s not much to be gained by watching a big bearded galoot repeatedly pretend to learn that particular heartwarming lesson. (That his interview subjects don’t guffaw at his naive questions, instead answering them earnestly, only confirms how fundamentally similar we all are: Everybody wants to be in a movie.) Given the Gordian nature of contemporary geopolitics, there’s simply no excuse for a perspective as blinkered and uninquisitive as Spurlock’s. Where in the World has a structuring absence, all right, but it isn’t Osama bin Laden. It’s the reason why anybody imagined this movie needed to be made at all.
Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?
* 1/2
Directed by Morgan Spurlock
Rated PG-13