Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? Out tomorrow. (****4/10)
Where In The World is Osama Bin Laden comes out August 26th from Alliance Films, and it’s a terrific premise for a movie. After watching The Hunting Party, and witnessing the amazingly easy capture of Radovan Karadzic a month ago in Belgrade, it isn’t actually a giant stretch to think that one guy with a camera crew could conceivably find the man. Or at the very least come pretty close. And certainly one guy with a camera crew who interviews the people closest to Bin Laden would bring out some information as to his whereabouts that would come as a shock to the general public. After all, it has been SEVEN years since September 11th. SEVEN. And has anyone, anywhere, come within sniffing distance of this guy? At the very least, a movie like this one will remind us that Public Enemy Number One is still at large. Like, hey! You remember that guy, who did the thing with the planes? Yeah, we still don’t have him. And perhaps we’ve stopped trying.
And, at the very least, that’s what this movie does. And that’s ALL it’s good for. Morgan Spurlock, the man who brought us the fantastic film Super-Size Me in 2003, has taken his second stab at directing, producing and starring in a documentary. And he has, for the most part, failed. While there is nothing overtly wrong with Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden, there is also nothing particularly right. He talks to people all over the world, in places where Osama Bin Laden may be hiding, and other places where he is obviously not hiding, getting their opinions on American foreign policy, and he talks to soldiers in Afghanistan and he makes a little bit of commentary on the situation. But here’s the thing - this is a documentary. And I learned nothing. Documentaries are supposed to teach you something. Either give you a window into a world you have never heard about, or give you a new insight into something with which you are already familiar. This movie does neither.
In the end, it feels just like one of those TV news pieces where they go out on the street and ask people’s opinions about something. Like high gas prices or Dion’s green shift. It’s just done in other parts of the world rather than in the United States. And Morgan Spurlock, while he has the ability to be funny, attempts to inject humour into this film where it doesn’t really belong, and it ends up being less funny and more irritating. Interspersed in between his interviews with the regular people of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, we get treated to phone calls between Spurlock and his pregnant wife who is waiting at home for him to return. I don’t know if these conversations are thrown in there as a way of justifying the fact that the film maker never really puts himself in harm’s way, or if they are just another way of making the movie more about Spurlock himself. Either way, it’s just distracting.
And I don’t think he needed to put himself in harm’s way. He seems to be doing so, at certain points in the movie, but you get the sense that at no time is he really in any danger at all. And if you’re going to make a movie like this, you have to do one of two things. Either go all the way - search through the mountains, dodge bullets, and talk to potentially dangerous terrorist targets. Or, make a movie that is so insightful and compelling that no one will care about the fact that you aren’t really trying to catch Osama Bin Laden. Spurlock has done neither, and therefore the movie doesn’t work. To find a really good movie about this conflict and this sort of subject matter, check out Blood Of My Brother. And ignore Where In The World is Osama Bin Laden.