wonderdawg Whaddya do when your last pic made $11 mil at the box office (not bad for a $300, 000 investment) and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary? Well, if you are Morgan Spurlock, writer and director of Supersize Me!, you put down your burger, get your shots and head to the Middle East to shoot a documentary about your mock serious search for the world's most wanted terrorist. After all, with his wife expecting the couple's first child the future father figures he's gotta do something: "If the CIA and FBI can't find him and I'm going to make the world safe for my kid it's time for a new plan. If I've learned anything from big budget action movies it's that complicated global problems are best solved by one lonely guy crazy enough to think he can fix everything before the credits roll." Spurlock begins his quest for OBL (as he calls him) with his tongue firmly in his cheek but as he travels through Egypt, Israel, Afghanistan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian West Bank and realizes the depth of anti-American feeling the tone of the film becomes sombre and introspective. ("It's hard for me to see how damaged the image of the country that I love and care about has become.") Don't expect any startling insights into the Middle East conflict. Spurlock films the trip from the viewpoint of an average American coping with culture shock and trying to make sense out of a complex situation. Whether he is thinking out loud on a voice-over or addressing the audience straight to camera Spurlock invites us along to share his discoveries. And who better for a tour guide? Riding with a Jerusalem bomb squad to check out a suspicious-looking package, heading into "hard core Taliban country" with a US military patrol or approaching total strangers in a crowded Arab marketplace and asking them if they can put him in touch with Osama bin Laden Spurlock is witty, smart, observant and unflappable. The majority of soundbites are from everyday men and women interviewed on the street, around the dinner table or in a desert village. (A young man in Tel Aviv compares the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate to a game of musical chairs. "Somebody is left without a chair ... but everybody needs to sit somewhere.") In the end Spurlock does not find OBL. What he does discover, however, is that whether they live in big cities or small mountain villages "there are a lot more people out there who are just like us then there are who are just like him."

Robert W. Upon retrospect and re-reading the review I gave to Spurlock's first film Super Size Me, it turns out that I am giving this one the same score out of ten but somehow Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden just isn't nearly as heartfelt, informative, nor mind changing. Some reviewers say that he makes you think about racism and typecasting and terrorism but I didn't get any of that. He just seemed to come up with this idea right out of the blue and go blundering into various middle eastern countries asking people where Osama is. Somehow after seeing the potential talent in Super Size Me, I thought this was a huge step down for him. Even Super Size Me felt like it was building to a climax that never happened but the thing of it is that there was actual information there and you were watching this disastrous change and the idea of fast food being so deadly is something that anyone could relate to. This on the other hand just doesn't even build to much of anything. The information provided is really sub par and as much as Morgan Spurlock manages to be interesting he just doesn't pull it off for this one.Once again all eyes are on writer, director and star Morgan Spurlock. There is no doubt that he is talented because if anything can be learned from both of his films it's that he has this way of relating to the audience. You don't feel like it's a documentary and he just simplifies everything and tries to make it a personal, important experience but with Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden it just didn't feel like he had the passion behind it. It more seemed like he just thought it was a decent idea. Its not that the film isn't worth seeing just don't expect it to really blow you away. Check out his early work in Super Size Me which I think I underrated the first time around. Regardless he has a lot of talent he just needs the right topic to cover and he'll really breakthrough. 6/10

movedout When Albert Brooks tried to reconfigure a massive cultural chasm into chuckles in the meta-comic "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World", he admitted markedly failure in finding common ground – Americans weren't ready to laugh, but more importantly, Muslims weren't ready. This was way back in 2005 when the War on Terror still had that new car smell. Now, Morgan Spurlock of "Super Size Me" fame follows Brooks' muddled footsteps into oblivion as he looks for cheap stunts in the Muslim world. Not for any sort of truth or insight, but vulgar shtick. To call this a documentary or even a docu-comedy would seem fallacious to the standings of both genres.Spurlock just isn't as interesting or humorous a personality as he assumes himself to be, which only serves to antagonise the idea of its premise being an odyssey into the treacherous abyss to find the world's most wanted man with only Spurlock as tour guide. He frames this sudden epiphany of a "dangerous post-9/11 world" with his wife getting pregnant. It's a faux-earnest set-up – interspersed with ridiculous allusions to his impending fatherhood and his superfluous wife's presence in the film when it cuts away back home – that becomes increasingly embarrassing as the film wears on, especially when it starts to become an excuse for Spurlock's failures and insecurities over his ill-conceived mission.Approaching this staged existential quandary from a place of blissful ignorance towards the Muslim world, Spurlock feigns mock surprise at how different the Muslim population is compared to America's perception of it was – they aren't all violent terrorists! Cut to Spurlock's histrionic astonishment over that nugget of information. And just as how easily he made his mock-realisation that a constant stream of fast food led to a death wish seem almost a quaint discovery, Spurlock leads the audience to think that he's doing some bold investigative work here by superficially interviewing the hoi polloi of the Gaza Strip and so-called relatives of Osama Bin Laden in Egypt. He makes his unexpected ejection from an Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood in Israel become his glib counterpoint to the idea that Muslims aren't bad eggs, but that Middle Eastern religiosity is just plain screwy and insular.Spurlock frequently pollutes his geographical opportunity into pure performance. He makes a dog and pony show about the sociopolitical strife in the region when he obviously knows better. His rehearsed, pandered surprise at the world outside of Manhattan shows a man who doesn't think squat of his audience's own comprehensions on the Middle East since 9/11 and his film ends up becoming just as shallow as his phony-baloney egoist brand of "documentaries".And only Spurlock seems equipped to turn his cultural ignorance into cultural arrogance – completing his transformation into a boorish man-with-a-camera into a Michael Moore-ish buffoon oblivious to his own chicanery. He insincerely coheres his film into a single, predictably trivial idea that these Middle-Easterners are just like us – from their love of family to their ultimate pursuit of peace on their land. Except Spurlock doesn't really believe that. To him, they are like us but they aren't really. His entire self-centred view of the Middle East engenders the film as a wholly facetious work of manipulation and even more egregiously, is ultimately condescending to the very subjects Spurlock explicitly extols at the end of his film.Perhaps we get the real glimpse of Spurlock as a person when he deigns to ask a jocular Egyptian man whether he was about to blow up his car or when he dons distinctively Arabic garb and starts randomly assaulting Saudi Arabian women in the mall about Bin Laden's whereabouts. It is a particularly contemptible redneck hustle that only reveals Morgan Spurlock as the sort of Ugly American that his Middle Eastern interviewees denounce as the true cause of their cultural discordance. Who can blame them?

TheEmulator23 I can see why this didn't do well box office wise, because quite frankly it's pretty boring. I like Morgan Spurlock & think in his future Documentary's he should always be in front of the camera as well as producing & directing it. He is a great personality, and if the subject is right, he can make even a questionable subject enjoyable. However this film is a very long 90 minutes & doesn't seem to have any real point to it. I loved "Super Size Me," & even his FX show 30 days is more interesting & has more to say than this. Unless you are a die-hard Spurlock fan, I would skip this. I will say w/a better subject & a little bit more direction & set-up, he could very well have another good theatrically released documentary. This just isn't it. There are a couple good chuckles here and there, but the story really doesn't take you anywhere that is very interesting. Spurlock will always have the excellent "Super Size Me" to his credit, but here's hoping he can get another good subject to tell us about in a more interesting & entertaining fashion.