Looking for a Terrorist, but Not Too Hard

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“Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?” is not so much a documentary as the movie equivalent of a nonfiction stunt book. You know the kind I mean: An author spends a year doing something just nutty and topical enough to earn a nice advance and shares the resulting insights with the public. And indeed Morgan Spurlock, the director of this film, has also written a tie-in volume that recounts, in somewhat greater detail than the movie, his half-joking search for the world’s most notorious terrorist.

Mr. Spurlock, whose experiment with an all-McDonald’s diet was the subject of his first film, “Super Size Me,” is a friendly, energetic fellow who makes strenuous use of those qualities. At the beginning of “Where in the World” he discovers that he is about to become a father, news that inspires him to leave his pregnant girlfriend in New York and set off on a hopscotching, sometimes hair-raising journey across North Africa and the Middle East.

Not because he is fleeing paternal responsibility, mind you, but because he wants to fulfill the basic fatherly duty of keeping his impending child safe by capturing a major threat to his well-being. The facetiousness of this project is charming at first — as is the conceit of depicting the hunt for Mr. bin Laden using video-game animation — but the charm wears off pretty quickly. Mr. Spurlock travels from Egypt to Morocco and then to Israel, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, asking if anyone knows where Mr. bin Laden might be and following up with slightly less inane questions.

The information he uncovers will astonish just about anyone who has managed to get through the years since Sept. 11, 2001, without opening a book or a newspaper, or for that matter seeing any of the dozens of more sober-minded, better-informed documentaries that deal with terrorism, American foreign policy, Islam and related matters. Even though we Americans are, according to Mr. Spurlock, conditioned by “the media” to regard all Muslims as violent extremists, he discovers that a lot of them are actually quite nice. Also, you may be interested to learn, the Israelis and Palestinians don’t get along so well, and there are a lot of problems in Afghanistan.

Who knew? Not Mr. Spurlock, apparently, who serves as his own straw man, repeatedly debunking his own disingenuous prejudice or naïveté. Wherever he goes, he finds people who respond to his amiable, good-humored questions with smiles and platitudes. There are, to be sure, a few exceptions. He hears a virulently anti-American, anti-Israel sermon in a Saudi mosque, and the repressiveness of that country freaks him out a little. And he receives a hostile welcome in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Israel, where the residents greet his inquiries with shouts and shoves.

He does not stick around long enough to explain that their behavior has more to do with tensions within Israeli society than with the Global War on Terror, but in general he’s less interested in analysis than in genial chats and easy jokes. His method — keeping himself on camera, button-holing strangers in the street, overdoing the folksiness — makes comparison with Michael Moore inevitable, but the difference is that Mr. Moore’s aw-shucks persona and ambush tactics advance a definite political point of view.

In contrast Mr. Spurlock, more so here than in “Super Size Me,” advances an essentially anti-political view of the world. It’s impossible to disagree with much of what he says in “Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden,” but it’s also impossible to learn anything about war, terrorism, religion, oil, democracy or any of the other topics a less glib, less self-absorbed filmmaker might want to tackle.

But maybe thinking about that kind of stuff would prevent us from grasping that we all just need to be nicer to one another. “I’m not saying we should all sit around the campfire singing ‘Kumbaya,’ ” Mr. Spurlock says. “That would be ridiculous.” Indeed it would. As a more practical alternative he suggests that we need to realize that the good folks of the world outnumber the bad ones and to celebrate the things we all have in common, like our children and our families and our desire for a better world. So true! But also, and more to the point: So what?

“Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has references to terrorism, war and other forms of violence.

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS OSAMA BIN LADEN

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Morgan Spurlock; written by Jeremy Chilnick and Mr. Spurlock; director of photography, Daniel Marracino; edited by Gavin Coleman and Julie (Bob) Lombardi; music by Jon Spurney; produced by Mr. Chilnick, Stacey Offman and Mr. Spurlock; released by the Weinstein Company. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes.