Morgan Failure | Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? fails to find a receptive audience.
Ed Gonzalez, Slant | “Morgan Spurlock’s ego makes Michael Moore’s appear small by comparison. In Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?, Spurlock presents himself as a character in a videogame and every pit stop on his trip, from Jordan to Pakistan, one increasingly precarious stage closer toward a presumable boss fight with Bin Laden.... Foregrounding his pop-cultural fixations, thus suffocating the flashes of insight he gives us into the lives of Middle Eastern people, Spurlock gives currency to the stereotype of the self-absorbed, globetrotting Ugly American.”
Tasha Robinson, The Onion AV Club | “The affirming message gives Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? a warm, fuzzy, pleasantly inclusive center. But that center is heavily coated with a numbing barrage of Michael Moore stunt journalism, dumbed-down history lectures, and a bright candy shell of animation and self-satisfied jokes. [The film] is a conversation-starter for ADD-stricken adolescents who can’t bear to think about one thing for too long, or too deeply.”
Annie Wagner, The Stranger | “Spurlock’s film consistently condescends to the non-Americans it portrays while pandering to its American audience. He conducts short interviews in English, being careful to keep his interpreters off-camera and mic; whether his subjects respond in French or Urdu, he nods dumbly, feigning sympathy even when they say outrageous things. The film conveys a bare minimum of historical or sociological information, content to assert that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East has been erratic and that poverty and joblessness feed terrorism. Meanwhile, the hodgepodge of animation more than once approaches racist caricature. Spurlock should really stick to hamburgers.”
Dana Stevens, Slate | “I wish this airheaded, if genial, road movie had been double-billed with a companion piece, Where in the World Is My Goddamn Husband?, in which we’d watch Spurlock’s wife, Alexandra Jamieson, clomp through her second and third trimesters alone in Brooklyn while her partner checked merrily in from the caves of Tora Bora.”
