Yes Men “punks” businesses

If Ashton Kutcher pulled pranks on world business leaders instead of Hollywood’s elite on Punk’d the result would be The Yes Men. This documentary follows the original Yes Men, Andy and Mike, on their mission to change the world one prank at a time.

What it lacks are the exciting “No, I did not fall for that!” moments from the Yes Men’s victims that make any prank worth rehashing. However, seeing these activists pose as representatives from the World Trade Organization and convincing an innocent audience that managers should wear leisure suits that include a phallic-like television screen to monitor their remote work force is still amusing.

The Yes Men starts off explaining Andy and Mike’s first great prank, gwbush.com. A friend owned the domain and asked the two pranksters, already responsible for the Barbie Liberation Organization, to design a satirical site making fun of the presidential candidate George W. Bush.

Following the press attention the site garnered after Bush made a statement about it, Yes Men were born. The rest of the documentary focuses on the events surrounding the satiric website www.gatt.org which attacks the WTO

The whole premise of The Yes Men is that international business conferences believe the website to be affiliated with the actual WTO and invite a representative to speak at their events.

First, the leisure suit with phallic-like television monitoring is introduced in Finland. After some national press, the men lecture to a group of university students that McDonald’s and the WTO are going to sell their post consumer waste as burgers to end third-world starvation.

As funny as parts of The Yes Men are, too much time is spent trying to develop these men separate from the pranks.

The film loses speed after the first stunt when all that happens afterward is the men laugh from behind a computer screen at their own work and question whether it’s more fun to be serious or satirical. Even the basis for their contempt for the WTO is poorly illustrated.

Where a mostly neutral party or an expert in the field should have explained what the WTO does, only Fahrenheit 9-11 director Michael Moore is interviewed. Moore is not an expert on trade agreements in foreign markets and his appearances in the film turn him into a co-star of a documentary where he doesn’t belong.

The Yes Men would be a great documentary if it further examined the motivation for the pranks and their effects instead of focusing on the men apart from their missions. Wait for The Yes Men on DVD so you can at least fast forward to the disgusted faces of college students being told that McDonald’s is developing waste burgers as they eat Big Macs.