The man walking down a street in Paris looks nervous. He's wearing a nice suit and is professionally groomed, but his eyes dart this way and that as he walks, and he babbles practiced PR phrases like "pleased to announce" and "move forward" over and over again.

You'd be nervous, too, if you were about to go on television and lie to 300 million people.

Andy Bichlbaum is one of "The Yes Men," a pair of clean-cut anti-corporate activists who prefer the inside job to standing out on a street corner waving a picket sign. They infiltrate corporate events and press conferences, passing themselves off as representatives of the companies and organizations they're protesting against, and then say and do things that showcase the dehumanizing effects of globalization.

For the Paris job, for example, Bichlbaum went on BBC World posing as a spokesman for the Dow Chemical Co. and claimed that the company was prepared to spend $12 billion to compensate the victims of the 1984 Union Carbide chemical disaster in Bhopal, India. In fact, Dow was going to do no such thing, but by the time Dow had gone on the BBC to correct the record, their stock had plunged. Because there's nothing stockholders hate more than a company doing the right thing if it eats into their profits.

The exploits of the Yes Men were first chronicled in "The Yes Men," a 2003 documentary by Milwaukee filmmaker Chris Smith ("American Movie") that played at the Wisconsin Film Festival. For the follow-up, "The Yes Men Fix The World," Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno decided to make the movie themselves. Aside from goofy little comedy sequences, such as a look inside their "secret lair," the new movie pretty much plays the same as the last one, as we watch "The Yes Men" plan and execute a series of thought-provoking and often very funny pranks.

At an oil and gas conference in Calgary, Alberta, Bichlbaum poses as an Exxon representative who proposes that human flesh would make an excellent biofuel, passing out little candles supposedly made from a deceased Exxon janitor to stunned attendees. At another conference, the duo pose as Halliburton executives selling a bubble-shaped suit designed to protect the wearer from any threat, from hurricanes to terrorism. The ideas are usually the setup to the joke; the punch line is the faces of their audience members, some baffled at what they see, others nodding approvingly at the most ridiculous notions.

While the satiric props make for funny viewing, the pranks that actually seem to have the most impact are the ones like the Dow announcement, where the Yes Men see what happens if they just get up on stage and pledge to do the right thing on behalf of a multinational corporation. The fallout from such scams are the best illustration of what the Yes Men see as the topsy-turvy moral world of capitalism, where it's unthinkable to do anything that's not in your immediate self-interest.

While Smith's 2003 film looked at the Yes Men from more of an objective distance, "Fix the World" is a more earnest movie; these guys really think they can open people's eyes and be a part of a massive global change. You can't fool all of the people all the time, but maybe the Yes Men can trick enough of them into doing what's right.

THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD

3 stars

Stars: Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno

Rated: Not rated

How long: 1:36

Opens: Friday

Where: Sundance

For fans of: "The Yes Men," "Capitalism: A Love Story," lying your teeth off

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