Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?

Review by Anthony Morris

In the years since Super-Size Me, Morgan Spurlock has become a one-man industry - hosting TV shows and lending his name to a line of movies as he aims to make himself "The Name You Can Trust" when it comes to a certain kind of issue-tackling documentary. 

It would only take one dud movie to bring it all tumbling down: fortunately Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden - for the most part - manages to maintain the Spurlock brand of decent documentary work.

Not ground-breaking documentary work, mind you.

This has its fair share of problems as average left-leaning white guy Spurlock decides that he can't bring a child into an unsafe world and therefore it's his duty to his unborn child to go off and find the world's number one terrorist.

For starters, Spurlock's more than happy to cram in gags and video game CGI to make light of his quest early on, which doesn't really sit right when he starts visiting various Middle Eastern countries and discovers that they're just people like him. 

You could argue that his use of video game imagery is designed to show how we're conditioned to see conflicts like The War on Terror in the West, with the later scenes where Spurlock just hangs out with average Middle-Eastern folk showing the reality behind those images... but that's probably drawing a long bow. 

What is true is that the scenes in the Middle East are both interesting and informative, and as a narrator Spurlock knows when to hang back and keep his mouth shut to let his subjects speak for themselves. 

The result isn't completely successful overall - the split between early comedy and later drama is a little too wide, and Spurlock never makes the shift believable as a reflection of his own changing perspective on the issue - but by focusing on the human side of the issue (especially on the children, which ties in nicely with his own situation as a soon-to-be-father) he's made a film that has some worthwhile things to say.

3.5 out of 5

Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?
Australian release: 14th August, 2008
Official Site: Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden
Cast: Morgan Spurlock, Alexandra Jamieson
Director: Morgan Spurlock