(R). Political pranksters go global. Funny but mild, and apt to spin its wheels. With Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno. Directed by Chris Smith, Dan Ollman and Sarah Price. 1:23 (language, innuendo). At the Sunshine Cinemas, East Houston Street and Second Avenue, Manhattan.

Making the festival rounds two years ago was a short film about the Yes Men, a loose coalition of anti-globalization activists, and how they conned their way into a Salzburg trade conference through slippery Internet manipulations, bad suits and a cargo container- load of chutzpah.

It was punchy, short and sweet - especially if one enjoyed watching clueless Austrian bureaucrats listening slack-jawed to proposals for selling votes and destroying cultural institutions in the interest of free trade.

"The Yes Men" as we have it now - an economical yet airless 89 minutes - uses Salzburg as flashback. Meanwhile, the Yes Men - principally Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, whom we have no reason either to believe or disbelieve about the things they say they do - go after presumably bigger and more impressive game, although nothing quite matches the weltschmertz of Salzburg. A conference in Finland, at which Bichlbaum introduces a gold- lamé jump suit with an employee monitor blooming out of its crotch, goes over like outdated herring. A symposium at a college in Plattsburgh, N.Y., at which the duo introduces the McDonald's Re-Burger - produced from nutritional "post-consumer" material, shall we say - is encouraging, because the kids get it a lot quicker than the adults.

Mostly, "The Yes Men" movie suffers because its three directors, Chris Smith (of the wildly overpraised "American Movie"), Dan Ollman and Sarah Price make us watch far too much preparation for the Yes Men stunts, there's far too much exposition about why and what they're doing and too many glitches in the process. And with two scenes of Michael Moore, there's too much Michael Moore - it's as if the directors thought they needed Moore's imprimatur to validate a profile of two characters who have their own very funny, very effective satirical shtick. They didn't.

Smith, presumably the ringmaster of this project, is clearly a devotee of the freak-show documentary - the "don't you feel superior" school of condescending, nonfiction filmmaking. That he would spend so much more time involved with Bichlbaum's and Bonanno's difficulties getting their stunts arranged than he does with the actual stunts is symptomatic of this attitude, as are the post-prank interviews with the Yes Men's supposedly hapless victims.

That Bichlbaum and Bonanno get as far as they do (if, in fact, they do) is a testament to their own gutsy, politically potent art. It's not about the people they con.

If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at nynewsday.com/archives.
Article licensing and reprint options