Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden?

Rating:

* * *

Verdict:

An exploration of geo-politics that will be revelatory for anyone who hasn't read a newspaper in the last seven years.

Nominally a documentary, the new film by the man who found fame by eating McDonalds three times a day for a month, is really a rather shallow cinematic gimmick. It put me in mind of A.J. Jacobs, the New Yorker who spent a year living by the literal prescriptions of the Bible  and then wrote a book about it. His venture was interesting for no other reason than that it occurred. Any overarching idea - that a literal interpretation of the

Bible

might be boneheaded, say - is going to bore those who already believed it and go straight over the heads of  well, those whose heads it goes over.

Spurlock's film may offer some insights to anybody who would be surprised to learn that some Muslims are not terrorists. People unaware that Palestinians and Israelis don't always get on may be in for an eye-opener too. The rest of us may find the film fitfully amusing and faintly charming.

It's a film of good intentions but it is rarely more than its conceit: Spurlock, on the verge of fatherhood, decides he has to keep the world safe for his unborn son by capturing the global villain of the title. His trip takes him across swathes of the Middle East and North Africa (I give nothing away by saying that he does not catch bin Laden) asking people such trenchant questions as: "What do you think of the war on terror?"

He starts out conceiving of the world outside America as hostile by definition - there's a telling early scene involving the same doctor who watched his liver dying in

Super Size Me

warning him of all the killer germs he might catch - and at some level he stays that way: when he shows us the drain that the blood flows down in a square where they behead people his lurid tone ill becomes a man from a country as enthusiastic as his about capital punishment.

In essence, his film is about his discovery that non-Americans are people too and that they may hate US foreign policy but they've got nothing against Americans. But we realise early on that he already knew that and that his Candide shtick is an act. It's hard to know whether he condescends more to his audience or his subjects by this approach. But this is not a film rich in respect for anyone's intelligence.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Morgan Spurlock

Director:

Morgan Spurlock

Running time:

90 mins

Rating:

M Contains offensive language

Screening:

Academy