Watch: Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? 2008 123movies, Full Movie Online – When Morgan Spurlock and his wife find out they are expecting a child in an unsafe world that faces multiple terrorist and environmental threats, Morgan decides to track down the world’s most wanted and dangerous terrorist, Osama Bin Laden, undergoes self-defense training, takes all required medical shots, and sets out to travel to Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Afghanistan, Pakistan amongst others to try and locate the man who has managed to elude the American army for nearly a decade. His fears, generated due to biased media coverage that Muslims and Arabs are hostile, are laid to rest when he does encounter friendly, and quite refreshingly well educated, hospitable, politically matured men and women, who are well aware of America’s faulty ‘foreign policy’, and do not subscribe to Jihad nor to the Taliban nor Osama’s terror-tactics. But he does encounter some hostility, quite ironically, in two of America’s allies — Israel and Saudi Arabia — and it is on the soil of Pakistan — his country’s ally against the so-called War Against Terror — that he eventually hopes to find Osama. The questions still remain: will he able to find him where many others have purportedly failed? And most importantly will he be allowed to remain alive after finding him?.
Plot: Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) tours the Middle East to discuss the war on terror with Arabic people.
Smart Tags: #terrorist #middle_east #question_in_title #terrorism #satire #pregnancy #islam #counter_terrorism #birth #al_qaeda
123movies | FMmovies | Putlocker | GoMovies | SolarMovie | Soap2day
6.5/10 Votes: 6,039 | |
38% | RottenTomatoes | |
45/100 | MetaCritic | |
N/A Votes: 47 Popularity: 4.515 | TMDB |
Entertaining, intelligent, and surprisingly humanistic, a very well done film
My biggest complaint with Morgan Spurlock’s last film SUPER SIZE ME was the inevitable feeling that you always got when a director narrates/stars in his own work: the risk that what he says and does can intentionally or unintentionally come off as really presumptuous, sometimes resulting talking down to an audience rather than educating or inspiring. This is even harder when making a film to appeal to a broad demographic as you often have to entertain rather than provide strict facts and it is a problem that documentary filmmakers from Werner Herzog to, most obviously, Michael Moore have faced. However, Morgan has found a fantastic balance: WHERE IN THE WORLD IS OSAMA BIN LADEN? is a near-perfect mix of style.In the beginning of the film we learn Morgan’s wife is pregnant, prompting him to ask himself, “How can I allow my child to grow up in such an unsafe world?” Though definitely tongue-in-cheek, this average and perfectly legitimate question leads him to the question of global terrorism and he decides to do what anyone in any big budget American action film does: a stupid ordinary guy fights back. Using his wife’s pregnancy as a backdrop, he travels to Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and finally Pakistan to attempt to come to the conclusion of where Osama bin Laden is.
As an American college student, I can safely say that I am aware that the United States’ foreign policy has not exactly put us in a good image for the rest of the world. Morgan Spurlock investigates what seemingly completely different cultures think of us and attempts to break the barriers of what common American propaganda has taught us about the Middle East. He interviews civilians, military officers, poor people, rich people, various relatives of Osama and other known al Qaeda operatives, government officials, heads of departments, and just people on the street to try to understand why the so-called “war on terror” is really as ridiculous as it appears to be. He tries to dispel common stereotypes about Americans while at the same time learning more about cultures and religions that we ourselves grossly stereotype to learn that we’re really not all that different.
The film’s greatest strength is the fact that Morgan learns with the audience. It does not feel like he is preaching to you, but you and him are both on this journey, from speaking to the Jews about Palestinians and the Palestinians about Jews, to finding relatives of known terrorists who watch professional wrestling and having dinner with farmers in the ghettos of Iraq while discussing raising kids.
It helps illuminates one of the world’s greatest disappointments: how the people who are the most extreme and the most negative are the only people we care to think about, how the moderates majority’s opinions are not represented, and ultimately how people are alike all over despite cultural barriers and popular stereotypes. All we are asked to find out if Osama bin Laden really is the most dangerous man in the world? Is Osama really the problem or is he the symptom of a bigger problem? Do the people we think like him even really like him?
It is a very good balance of an entertaining, mass-appealing film that neither dumbs down its material nor treats its audience like idiots or the director like a genius. It is also a very humanistic film, showing how the many good people are all too often overshadowed by the few evil ones who just happen to have more power and influence. I hope that more Americans, particularly ones constantly fed gross stereotypes and lies by their government get to see this film.
Cheap stunts and dumbed down politics
When Albert Brooks tried to reconfigure a massive cultural chasm into chuckles in the meta-comic “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World”, he admitted markedly failure in finding common ground Americans weren’t ready to laugh, but more importantly, Muslims weren’t ready. This was way back in 2005 when the War on Terror still had that new car smell. Now, Morgan Spurlock of “Super Size Me” fame follows Brooks’ muddled footsteps into oblivion as he looks for cheap stunts in the Muslim world. Not for any sort of truth or insight, but vulgar shtick. To call this a documentary or even a docu-comedy would seem fallacious to the standings of both genres.Spurlock just isn’t as interesting or humorous a personality as he assumes himself to be, which only serves to antagonise the idea of its premise being an odyssey into the treacherous abyss to find the world’s most wanted man with only Spurlock as tour guide. He frames this sudden epiphany of a “dangerous post-9/11 world” with his wife getting pregnant. It’s a faux-earnest set-up interspersed with ridiculous allusions to his impending fatherhood and his superfluous wife’s presence in the film when it cuts away back home that becomes increasingly embarrassing as the film wears on, especially when it starts to become an excuse for Spurlock’s failures and insecurities over his ill-conceived mission.
Approaching this staged existential quandary from a place of blissful ignorance towards the Muslim world, Spurlock feigns mock surprise at how different the Muslim population is compared to America’s perception of it was they aren’t all violent terrorists! Cut to Spurlock’s histrionic astonishment over that nugget of information. And just as how easily he made his mock-realisation that a constant stream of fast food led to a death wish seem almost a quaint discovery, Spurlock leads the audience to think that he’s doing some bold investigative work here by superficially interviewing the hoi polloi of the Gaza Strip and so-called relatives of Osama Bin Laden in Egypt. He makes his unexpected ejection from an Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood in Israel become his glib counterpoint to the idea that Muslims aren’t bad eggs, but that Middle Eastern religiosity is just plain screwy and insular.
Spurlock frequently pollutes his geographical opportunity into pure performance. He makes a dog and pony show about the sociopolitical strife in the region when he obviously knows better. His rehearsed, pandered surprise at the world outside of Manhattan shows a man who doesn’t think squat of his audience’s own comprehensions on the Middle East since 9/11 and his film ends up becoming just as shallow as his phony-baloney egoist brand of “documentaries”.
And only Spurlock seems equipped to turn his cultural ignorance into cultural arrogance completing his transformation into a boorish man-with-a-camera into a Michael Moore-ish buffoon oblivious to his own chicanery. He insincerely coheres his film into a single, predictably trivial idea that these Middle-Easterners are just like us from their love of family to their ultimate pursuit of peace on their land. Except Spurlock doesn’t really believe that. To him, they are like us but they aren’t really. His entire self-centred view of the Middle East engenders the film as a wholly facetious work of manipulation and even more egregiously, is ultimately condescending to the very subjects Spurlock explicitly extols at the end of his film.
Perhaps we get the real glimpse of Spurlock as a person when he deigns to ask a jocular Egyptian man whether he was about to blow up his car or when he dons distinctively Arabic garb and starts randomly assaulting Saudi Arabian women in the mall about Bin Laden’s whereabouts. It is a particularly contemptible redneck hustle that only reveals Morgan Spurlock as the sort of Ugly American that his Middle Eastern interviewees denounce as the true cause of their cultural discordance. Who can blame them?
Original Language en
Runtime 1 hr 30 min (90 min)
Budget 0
Revenue 0
Status Released
Rated PG-13
Genre Documentary, Comedy, War
Director Morgan Spurlock
Writer Jeremy Chilnick, Morgan Spurlock
Actors Morgan Spurlock, George Bush, Dick Cheney
Country United States, France
Awards 2 wins & 1 nomination
Production Company N/A
Website N/A
Sound Mix Dolby Digital
Aspect Ratio 1.85 : 1
Camera N/A
Laboratory Technicolor, USA (prints)
Film Length N/A
Negative Format Video (HDTV)
Cinematographic Process HDV
Printed Film Format 35 mm (Fuji)