As the story goes, in early 2007, the Weinstein Company bought the rights to the documentary “Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?” after seeing only 15 minutes of footage at the Berlin International Film Festival. They should have taken the time to watch the whole thing. So little new information and meaningful context are brought to the table in Morgan Spurlock’s film that one truly wonders how the director felt comfortable presenting it to the American public as a finished product.

What we have here is a case of hype and style run amok, a superficial shot at glory that doesn’t so much crash and burn as stall before reaching first gear. “Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?” plays like a failed reporting mission, featuring at its center a flailing filmmaker struggling to find any hook or headline that will allow him to salvage his footage.

But the biggest mystery surrounding this movie must be why the parties involved decided to screen it for critics at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The more effective strategy — as any marketer would surely tell those at Weinstein — would have been to refuse to show the film to anyone, thereby allowing the mystery surrounding Mr. Spurlock’s potential discovery of bin Laden’s whereabouts to bring in the crowds.

Alas, that mystery was shattered during that packed January screening: No, bin Laden remains at large, location unknown, and no, Mr. Spurlock didn’t discover anything while on the ground in the Middle East that was not already widely known.

In other words, the story is a bust and the movie is a fraud.

That said, if one has managed thus far to avoid the full breadth of Iraq-based documentaries — including “The War Tapes,” “Iraq in Fragments,” “No End in Sight,” and the Academy Award-winning “Taxi to the Dark Side” — then Mr. Spurlock’s whirlwind adventure might retain an aura of the novel. Mr. Spurlock begins the movie, on the streets of Brooklyn, by invoking the “can-do” attitude of so many Hollywood heroes. “If I’ve learned anything from big-budget action movies,” he says, “it’s that complicated global problems are best solved by one lonely guy.”

So the director, who became an overnight success in 2004 with his gross-out documentary “Super Size Me,” sets about preparing for his big, bad Middle East adventure. He gets the required vaccines and seeks out training on how to fire a gun, avoid a grenade, and engage a terrorist in hand-to-hand combat.

Truth be told, when I first saw the movie at the highly anticipated screening in Park City, I enjoyed the lighthearted tone of the opening segments. Far from taking himself too seriously, Mr. Spurlock seemed to be bringing a fresh sense of humor to his survey of a world overwhelmed by fear and war. Even the movie’s opening credits, which are depicted in the style of a video game — a computer-graphics gimmick repeated throughout the film — was an interesting, media-savvy twist to the grim talking heads that so often dominate documentaries on this subject.

What’s missing from “Where in the World,” however, is the flip side to that silly coin. In “Super Size Me,” the gimmick of eating McDonald’s food for 30 days gave way to a thorough behind-the-scenes survey of fast-food culture. For those who had not read “Fast Food Nation,” it was nothing short of an exposé, revealing the way companies make and market a product, all while manipulating their customer bases.

Here, though, nothing waits beneath the surface. No Osama bin Laden. No sudden epiphanies from foreign leaders or citizens about the war, the invasion, the occupation, or the insurgency. No insightful or surprising examinations of modern attitudes. All we have is Mr. Spurlock, heading from country to country, hollering into some remote caves, and talking to an array of moderate Muslims who seem to unanimously believe that the Middle East loves America but hates the current American administration.

Yet on he goes, country to country, asking people what they think about it all, and sounding surprised when every foreigner he encounters isn’t a monster, looking somber when his subjects suggest that things are bleak and seem only to be getting bleaker. Given the showmanship of Mr. Spurlock’s oeuvre, we keep waiting for the Michael Moore moment, when the director will try to confront someone somewhere about what he’s found. Heck, we could settle even for a bit of plagiarism, had Mr. Spurlock sought out a source from another Iraq documentary and tried to put someone’s feet to the fire.

What a travesty to think that “Where in the World,” which is helmed by a filmmaker uninterested in ruffling feathers or turning over stones, could be the first box-office hit about the war in Iraq.

ssnyder@nysun.com