Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? (12A)

Whereas Spurlock's previous documentary feature "Supersize Me" had a focus in terms of an experiment and its results, i.e. what happens to you if you live on McDonald's fast food and nothing else, this one is more of a vague ramble round the world.  

At the beginning of the film Spurlock discovers that his girlfriend is pregnant. On the facetious excuse that he wants to fulfill his fatherly duty of keeping his child safe by capturing a major threat to the baby's well-being, he sets off on a journey across North Africa and the Middle East, taking in Egypt, Morocco, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, ostensibly to answer the question of the title. Which might well strike you as a rather feeble and selfish excuse to leave his girlfriend to cope with her pregnancy alone, because not surprisingly we know he's not going to get an answer to that question and his quest is certainly not going to protect his child from the so called "war on terror". One can only hope he's earned enough from the film and its accompanying book version to buy some nappies and a baby carriage. 

Spurlock's an amiable enough personality and his use of animation in terms  of mock video games about Osama and such is slick and amusing but after a while his what is hopefully false naïveté become a bit irritating. Nobody surely can be as ill informed about the world as he appears to be?   It's possible that he learned something in his travels from the not exactly penetrating questions he asks of "ordinary folk" around the world, though its stuff most of us already know. For example, people hate the American government though not the American people;   some Muslims are really quite  nice;   Afghans have been living in a state of war for thirty years;   Orthodox Jews in Israel don't like being cross questioned by an inane stranger with a camera crew, when they have more important things to worry about, which incidentally have nothing to do with Osama bin Laden - and so on and so on. 

The jokes fall flat in the context of the underlying seriousness of the subject and Spurlock's journey has few surprises for most of us, though it does have some interest as a travelogue,. The film does little to improve either America's image to the rest of the world or indeed Spurlock's.  It's ersatz Michael Moore without the political bite and Spurlock himself comes over as the sort of American tourist one tries to avoid getting stuck with when travelling.