Directed by Morgan Spurlock. (PG) 90 min. Opens May 16. See interview May 16 at eyeweekly.com.
It’s easy to tell the difference between past documentaries about the search for America’s most wanted man and a Morgan Spurlock movie on the same topic. Examples of the former generally do not include mock music videos in which al Qaeda’s main man busts a move to MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This.” Nor would an attempt to find his whereabouts involve calling every bin Laden in the Riyadh phone book. And not even Anderson Cooper would be caught on camera sticking his head in a cave in Tora Bora and shouting, “Yoo-hoo… Osama?”
In Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?, the director of Super Size Me tackles post-9/11 geopolitics with the same gusto he once reserved for a McDonald’s combo meal. Despite the film’s title, the search for bin Laden is less fruitful than Spurlock’s encounters with ordinary people throughout his tour of the Middle East. The filmmaker’s own impending fatherhood fuels a genuine and admirable curiosity about the circumstances for families throughout the region, as well as larger questions about the kind of world that all of our children will inherit.
Unfortunately, Spurlock himself seems so wary of boring viewers over the age of seven he ends up trivializing the topic with corny shtick. The overly simplistic analysis and folks-are-the-same-all-over sentimentality also detract from the movie’s more powerful moments of insight, connection and confrontation.