In the four years since Super Size Me, his investigation into America’s poor nutritional options hooked on his stunt of eating nothing but McDonalds food for a month, was an Oscar-nominated hit, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock has put his newfound fame into producing documentaries for television. Now he’s back on the big screen with a movie that asks a different question about the world in which we are raising our children. In fact, the impending birth of his first child was the factor that led Spurlock to make Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? Or maybe that’s just what he told his wife as an explanation of why he set off to dangerous regions across the Middle East as her pregnancy advanced. Looking for the world’s most infamous terrorist in order to make the world a safer place for his child is, of course, a tongue-in-cheek quest. (As he puts it, “If I’ve learned one thing from action movies, it’s that complex international situations are best solved by one man on a mission.”) Comical animation, faux video game sequences and parody sons a la South Park soon give way to the Spurlock’s real intention: as he travels through Egypt, Morocco, Palestine, Israel, Afghanistan and Pakistan asking the people he meets where Osama is hiding, he elicits their own feelings—not just about the United States and our presence in their backyards, but the conditions in which they have to bring up their own families. Some of it, in the Michael Moore tradition, is bizarrely funny, like an interview with the governor of the Afghani province of Tora Bora who wants to turn this desolate region—Osama’s last known hiding place—into an international tourism destination with a Ferris wheel and a roller coaster and water park. Just as much is genuinely disturbing: the worst reactions he gets are from some of the residents of our supposed allies in the region, Saudi Arabia and Israel. But along the way Spurlock manages to knock down a lot of barriers in international understanding. Everywhere he goes, people worry about their families, smile for the camera, and love professional wrestling—just like Americans.

—m. faust