Morgan Spurlock has built his career on doing what others won’t. In his breakthrough documentary, Supersize Me, he submitted himself to a steady, punishing diet of McDonald’s. He followed that film’s success with a television show, 30 Days, based on the same essential premise of short-term lifestyle changes.
His latest self-focused documentary, Where in the World is Osama bin Laden, his formula to the global stage, trotting him through that all-too-scary frontier while asking the film’s titular question to nearly everyone he meets. While Spurlock may have no trouble putting himself in front of the camera and into cringe-inducing situations, Where in the World proves one other essential truth about him as a filmmaker — the willingness to do something is not the same thing as having something to say.
Opening with the pop Bowling for Columbine-style animation that has become a requirement for any “funny” documentary, Spurlock lays out a premise so solipsistic it’s a wonder he doesn’t find bin Laden in his own belly button lint: with a new baby on the way, he’s got to scour the dangerous world to find its most dangerous man. No light riff on the “what kind of a world am I bringing this child into” chestnut, Spurlock spends several saccharine sequences calling his pregnant wife to tell her how much he misses her. He even concludes the film with a “We Are the World”-style sequence of obviously prompted smiles to prove that, shucks, we all just want to live in a peaceful world.
One of these smiles, let’s be clear, is on the face of one of the film’s earlier interview subjects — an extremist imam whose sermons call for the deaths of Jews in Israel. Kumbaya.
With research as shallow as a Google-search providing context for a world embroiled in terror, Spurlock relies primarily on interviews with everyday folks from a variety of Middle Eastern countries and a few academics and activists thrown in for good measure. Of course, there’s a reason documentary filmmakers tend to cherry-pick interviewees with refined messages. At the risk of spoiling the film’s major revelations, Spurlock’s interviews tend along three basic themes: The U.S. has a major problem with its image abroad, not all Muslims are terrorists and extremism is negative
Inflated dares do not a documentary filmmaker make, and unfortunately that’s all Spurlock seems to have to offer. Stripped of its cribbed Michael Moore esthetic and the Supersize Me cachet, Where in the World barely scratches the surface of this generation’s struggles with terrorism, the U.S.’s failed foreign policy or our own ignorance of the wider world. While Spurlock may do what others won’t, he doesn’t have anything to add.
