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In 2003’s The Yes Men, Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum set up a website mimicking and lampooning the World Trade Organization, a corporation they oppose.  Their website, however, was mistaken for the real thing and they were invited to speak at important meetings and functions as representatives for the WTO.  They decided to use the opportunity to hold a mirror up and show the corporations their own greed and hopefully make a difference.  Now, with The Yes Men Fix the World, a sequel of sorts, they have gotten even better at making people think they represent companies they do not.

The Yes Men take a page from Sasha Baron Cohen and two pages from Michael Moore to turn in their elaborate pranks on large corporations.  In the first of four hoaxes shown in this film, Andy gets invited to go on the BBC as a spokesperson for Dow Chemical.  The reason for his invitation is the anniversary of the worst industrial disaster in history, a disaster Dow is responsible for: the Bhopal catastrophe.  For those of you who do not know, in 1984 a Union Carbide pesticide plant released 42 tons of toxic methyl isocyanate gas exposing more than 500,000 people to the toxic gas, and killing over 25,000 people both directly and from exposure-related diseases.  Union Carbide was purchased by Dow in 2001.  Neither company has taken any responsibility for what happened in Bhopal.  The pesticide plant still stands today, unusable and leaching poisonous chemicals into the drinking water of the surrounding cities.  So when a spokesperson from Dow goes on the BBC and announces that the company plans to take responsibility for Bhopal and is setting up a $12 billion dollar fund to help those still suffering and their families, one would expect people to celebrate that someone is finally doing the right thing.  Instead, Dow’s stock drops two billion dollars.  When it’s discovered that the man who came on the BBC to make that announcement was actually masquerading as a spokesperson from Dow and had no credentials whatsoever, you can imagine the tidal wave of emotion, not only from the stockholders of Dow but also from the people in Bhopal who thought they were going to finally get bailed out.  It is an unfortunate side effect of their mischief that Mike and Andy bestow false hope upon the people they are trying to help.  Of course, they find some people to put in front of the camera who say that some hope is better then no hope and that recognition has finally been brought to their problem, but you still feel bad that, at the end of the day, nothing was really accomplished by all of Mike and Andy’s tomfoolery.

This film has very good production values for a documentary.  Lately, it feels and looks like documentaries’ budgets have dropped considerably.  It’s as if the filmmakers felt their point was so strong it could carry the all of emotional weight of the cause and that setting up a stationary camera with a few talking heads was all they needed do to get their point across.  The Yes Men go above and beyond just using talking heads.  There are lots of superfluous and well-constructed shots, cartoons and computer graphics added in to make a point and often also for a laugh.  Alas, there’s the rub – and one of the major problems with the way this social commentary is set up.  The tone is entertaining and often the humor is very tongue-in-cheek, which then diffuses some of the seriousness out of the problems they are discussing.  When they are talking about and showing all the displaced people in New Orleans, it’s almost given to the audience as an aside when instead it should be pulling on our heartstrings.  The filmmakers should know that the most effective way to get people up in arms, to make a change and a difference, is to magnify their feelings of pity and empathy for the victims on the screen above them.  However they seem to be too caught up in their own cleverness to bother with that sort of thing.  On top of that, their Saturday-morning, Beakman’s World approach to explaining complex theories and topics such as “Free Market” and “The Kyoto Protocol” never explain the concepts thoroughly enough for those uneducated about such things to follow what they are discussing.

There are four different corporations they spoof; Dow Chemical, Exxon, Haliburton and The New York Times.  The connective tissue between each of these escapades is often nothing more than a thin segue, making them feel more like four different and distinct pranks instead of a point or a cause they are trying to push and follow through to the end.  Every time they get in front of an audience they try a different tactic to garner a response; first horror, then tastelessness and finally ridicule.  They want to shock their audience awake yet each time they get the same response, a gentle malaise followed by apathy.  The cause of their failure is in the movie itself – what’s shocking to outsiders is normal to insiders.  They seem to be unable to grasp this and ultimately, the title The Yes Men Fix the World is a serious case of false advertisement.  Their efforts, however valiant, do not have the effect on the people they intended because no matter how brightly you shine a light on the problem, changes will not be made if the corporations refuse to look, or see no problem with what’s being done.  Making a film about their antics and showing us, the consumers and sometime victims of corporate greed, what is really happening is apparently the next best thing to getting their point, however unfocused it many be, across.

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