Photo Courtesy Sundance Film Festival.

During the Q&A following the Sundance world premiere of his film, Andy Bichlbaum admitted that he really is quite shy in real life--despite having recently fibbed his way onto the world’s most-watched news broadcast to give the second-largest chemical manufacturer on earth a black eye. Bichlbaum and partner-in-crime Mike Bonanno are the Yes Men, a pair of gonzo political activists who loudly impersonate captains of industry to pull the curtain back from corporate mischief. Their resumes include Dow Chemical, Halliburton, HUD, Exxon Mobil, The New York Times and, with this second Yes Men feature doc, the titles of writer/director/producer. (The film was co-directed by Kurt Engfehr, while the duo's debut in 2003’s The Yes Men, another Sundance premiere, was directed by American Movie's Dan Olman, Sarah Price, and Chris Smith.)

The Yes Men Fix the World is “part screwball comedy about the apocalypse, part call to arms,” according to its press kit. It’s a collection of the group’s most recent missions, strung together by overarching themes and a comedic structural device: Bichlbaum and Bonanno roaming a post-industrial American wasteland with nothing but their thrift store suits and limited Web design skills to sustain them. The film boasts a disarming DIY quality--by necessity as much as design--and the only underwater ballet you’ll see in a political documentary. The Yes Men themselves are charmingly watchable and succeed in extracting humor from the bleakest of places.

Case in point: In 1984, a Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India, leaked 42 tons of poisonous gas. Estimates vary, but at least three thousand people died initially, (many trampled in the ensuing panic) and thousands more have been dealing with the health and environmental impact ever since. Every investigation has determined that company negligence provoked the catastrophe, yet no victim has ever been compensated.

Almost 20 years after the world’s worst industrial disaster and four years since Dow Chemical bought Union Carbide, the Yes Men setup a fake Web site - DowEthics.com. Just before the Bhopal anniversary, they were contacted by the BBC and asked to appear on a live broadcast. Bichlbaum assumed a fake identity as a Dow spokesman and went on the air to announce his company’s plan to liquidate Union Carbide and use it’s net worth to redress the people of Bhopal. It wasn’t a hoax, Bichlbaum says in the film, but an accurate representation of what Dow should do.

...Fix the World is mature beyond its predecessor. It still showcases elaborate stunts like a hilariously low-budget heist movie, but it also examines their context and repercussions. After the BBC incident, the Yes Men travel to India to get the Bhopal victim’s reactions directly. Later, they ask a high-strung stock trader how their prank impacted Dow shareholders. Mike and Andy’s exploration of their own collateral damage gels into a potent, if perhaps oversimplified indictment of unregulated free market economics.

According to the Yes Men, the free market rewards profit and punishes loss, completely irrespective of whether or not profit means chemically obliterating a populous city in India, or if loss means returning hurricane refugees to their rightful homes. The market is blind to the moral peripherals of its bottom line; ethical behavior isn’t positively reinforced, and corporate malfeasance, if fiscally sound, is actually rewarded.

“Jude Finisterra’s” announcement on the BBC that his company would improve the well-being of thousands of people in exchange for making “slightly less profit than normal,” immediately knocked three percent off Dow’s share price. The Yes Men ask, “Under such circumstances, why would any company do the right thing?”

A potential answer is that companies are still comprised of people, and people can generally avoid being complete tools. But the film stops short of exploring the gray area between the individual actions of a group of decent people and the sole voice of a malicious corporate giant. The Yes Men do an excellent job of snatching hidden-camera gotch-ya's from people wearing suits, but the price they pay is a superficial delineation of good and evil.

With this simplicity, the film falls into a large category of political docs that are more likely to rally the base than actually sway the opposition. Yet the film is self-aware in its goals. The Yes Men aren’t trying to convince their ideological opposites to stop shopping at Wal-Mart, they’re trying to get their constituents to take to the streets.

Over a beer the day after the inauguration, I got to talk to Andy Bichlbaum--If that is his real name...It’s not. Obama will probably find himself in a room, Bichlbaum said, with a few important people trying to convince him to sign off on some pretty awful stuff. It’s that much easier for him to say, "No," if he can point out the window to the thousands of people in the streets and say, “What about them?”

The Yes Men Fix the World will open the Berlinale Dokumente section on February 6.