Just to get this out of the way early: yes, Morgan Spurlock does find Osama bin Laden in his new documentary. He runs into the Al-Qaeda leader at a Starbucks in Islamabad, wrestles the nonfat vanilla latte out of his hands, and delivers him into the arms of Prince Harry and his British Army battalion. Hard to believe this didn’t make the papers, isn’t it?
OK, I apologize – that’s not really what happens, but hey, if it’s all right for documentarians to fudge the truth here and there, why can’t we humble ink-stained…er, pixel-stained wretches do the same? Not that Spurlock is guilty of any real whoppers here – or at least, none that I’m aware of yet. But the premise of Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? is just a tad disingenuous: Spurlock, upon learning that he is about to become a father for the first time, attempts to track down Public Enemy #1 to make the world safer for his unborn child.
Certainly if the Super Size Me director had managed to stumble upon bin Laden, he would have been thrilled to capture the encounter on camera, assuming he’d escaped with his life. But what he’s really up to here is using his genial everyman persona to chat up the people in the streets of Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Afghanistan and Pakistan and find out what they really think about this whole crazy Islamic terrorism/American imperialism situation we’ve got going on here. In service of this quest, Spurlock makes sure we’re constantly entertained by animated sequences, goofy songs, videogame graphics, funny disguises and Cliffs Notes history lessons in the form of standup comedy routines.
As a result, the film is about as deep as the old Depeche Mode lyrics: “People are people, so why should it be that you and I should get along so awfully?” But Spurlock is such an amiable presence that, truth be told, he doesn’t get along awfully with anyone aside from a hostile gathering of Hasidic Jews. He’s the kind of guy anyone would want to have a beer with (in fact, full disclosure here: due to a power outage during the SXSW screening, there was a 30-minute delay during which Spurlock bought a round for the house), which makes the vanity project aspect of Where in World a little more forgivable. But fair warning: expect to learn a lot more about Spurlock’s personal life than about Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts.