Movie Review: 'Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?'

Despite its rather biblical veneer, you don't have to go into the history books to find the inspiration for Morgan Spurlock's latest venture. In style and philosophy as well as subject, this comedic documentary seems to have fully adopted the cut and paste approach to film-making.

Dispensing with conventional methods of interviewing, insights in this film are divulged through heart warming (and/or stopping) footage, as we are thrown headlong into a giant game where paper cut-outs with distorted 2-D bodies reveal the often odd circumstances of Spurlock's adventures. The impending birth of his first child, for example, initially juxtaposes an innate fear that the world isn't actually safe enough to breed in.

What follows is a half animated, half real-life trip around the world in the style made famous by the cult classic game of the 80s, "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego", that was masterminded by National Geographic to increase geography knowledge among Americans.

Tracing his travels with a giant map and deploying a brutally cavalier approach to interviewing, Spurlock flies around the Middle East looking for clues as to where Carmen Sandiego's real life counterpart, Osama Bin Laden, is hiding. A man infamous for countless deaths around the world, a key figure in terrorism and America's most wanted foreigner is thus hunted by a man whose only prior claim to fame was to eat junk and get fat!

Ruthless and at times stupidly unsympathetic to the people and cultures he imposes himself on, Spurlock's latest attempt at intelligent humour following Super Size Me leaves a somewhat sour taste in the mouth and the feeling that he has bitten off more than he can chew.

He dishes out jokes and questions as though on an American talk show, seemingly mocking those he interviews but without discovering any valuable information. In fact, any journalistic drive to discover the roots of public opinion are lead, bizarrely, by those answering the questions as they explore in their own minds the madness that has ensnared their world.

Despite the unfortunate American reality show stencil, however, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden does do what it intends to in that it reveals a more human side to the Middle East. There are no great revelations, no curve balls and Osama Bin Laden is still at large and living (supposedly) in Pakistan, but the people living under the shadow of al-Qaeda are strikingly revealed as normal people just trying to make the best out of a bad situation.

Three stars