Who knew Osama bin Laden could rap and roll? Not in the flesh, admittedly, but his animated cut-out sure has some nifty moves as Morgan Spurlock speculates on the whereabouts of America’s Most Wanted Man.

Computer game graphics spice up the opening salvo in the director’s quest to make the world safe for his other work in progress, the unborn child his wife Alexandra is carrying. “If big budget films have taught me anything,” Spurlock deadpans, “it’s that complicated global problems are best solved by one guy.”

Cue risk-containment training from a security expert who shows him how to check for car bombs, maximise survival chances in a hostage situation (basically, do what you’re told), and read blood splatters for clues. Spurlock also learns a few words of Arabic (“Take the cameraman instead”), grows his beard, and takes innumerable vaccination shots like a man. He has just four months to find bin Laden and deliver the world from evil before Alex’s “Special Delivery” is due.

Not that he seems in too much of a hurry to cut to the chase. Instead of dropping into Peshawar, Spurlock embarks on a whistle-stop tour of the Middle East. In Egypt he learns that democracy is not all that it seems, and that the US has been propping up Hosni Mubarak for decades. In Morocco, our intrepid investigator determines that poverty is a breeding ground for terrorism, and, more importantly, that people are people.

From here it’s just a hop and a skip to Palestine, another root cause for the Jihadists. Here Spurlock finds walls, barbed wire and explosives. He rides shotgun with an Israeli bomb disposal unit and helps to defuse a suspicious bikini – only to be roughed up by unfriendly Hasidics. “So many things are wrong on both sides,” the director confides unhappily that night. World peace may be trickier than he had thought.

And so it goes on. In Saudi Arabia he unearths political repression and self-censorship. In Afghanistan there seems to be some sort of war going on. No one can get Osama on the phone, or even provide an email address, though several helpful natives point convincingly in the direction of the mountains. “Would it be dangerous for me to go there?” Spurlock asks, nervously. They laugh and reassure him that it would most certainly prove fatal.

It’s safe to say that no Times reader will learn anything about the War on Terror from Where in the World is Osama bin Laden? Like Michael Moore, Spurlock is addressing a homegrown constituency; he assumes willful ignorance, and panders to it with faux-naïve comic stunts and parodic references to pop culture.

In a sense, he is the mini Michael Moore. Certainly he’s a less adroit propagandist, a more mundane humourist and film-maker (the press corps here in Sundance received the film with a stifled yawn). An awful lot of this boils down to convincing his fellow countrymen that Muslims can distinguish between American foreign policy and Americans; that they want a better life for their children and a modicum of security and freedom for themselves, just like we do.

That’s a legitimate message, no doubt, but when Spurlock ends his film with footage of his daughter’s home-birth and the 1975 war song “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” – without a trace of irony – you have to wonder if that aforementioned naivety might not be so faux after all?

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