“This is my friend Andy and my name is Mike. Today I am holding the camera. Andy is about to go on live television in front of 300 million people. They’re going to think that he represents one of the largest companies in the world, which he doesn’t, which is why he looks so nervous. Andy is about to tell a really big lie. Which is unfortunately going to wipe $2 billion off some company’s stock price.”

That’s the beginning of “The Yes Men Fix the World” - the feel-good documentary about environmental disaster and corporate greed of the year.

Unless you’re a masochist, you probably steer clear of movies about the industrial accident in Bhopal, India, that killed and sickened thousands more than 20 years ago. You’ve seen Al Gore’s movie and that told you plenty about climate change. You were sickened by Hurricane Katrina and don’t see the aim of signing petitions aiming to get Housing and Urban Development to open up their shuttered housing projects. This necessary callousness is a survival instinct: when your baby needs $1,200 in routine vaccinations, half your friends are near-suicidal over the lack of jobs and your parents’ retirement savings are looking so bad they’re asking to move back in with you, giving the problems of the world the attention they deserve is enough to make you hide in the water heater closet with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears.

But “The Yes Men Fix the World” is the “Wildboyz” of socially progressive stunts on video. “Wildboyz,” if you haven’t seen it, is a spinoff of the MTV show “Jackass,” trading “Jackass“‘s skateboard stunts and painful shopping cart pranks for half-clothed, constantly giggling encounters with wildlife from Africa to Alaska. “Wildboyz” appears to be a couple of idiots looking for excuses to dress up in loin cloths and taunting pelicans, but it’s actually just Steve Irwin with more marijuana and less khaki.

The Yes Men - Jacques Servin, a.k.a. Andy Bichlbaum and Igor Vamos, a.k.a. Mike Bonanno - apply the same principles to advocating for social change. They don’t say humorless things like “advocating for social change,” for instance. They slick their hair to the side, dress up in cheap suits, set up fake websites - like dowethics.com - and wait to get invited to conferences, or to interviews on BBC and CNN where they pretend to represent Dow, or Exxon, or the government, and promise billions to clean up industrial sites, compensate victims, rebuild wetlands, reopen closed public housing. Or they pitch slick, applause-getting ideas about how to make money even when your company kills people. They offer up an alternative-energy idea that relies on corpses as fuel. Businessmen - real ones - come up to them later and laud them as “refreshing.”

Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, in thinking he’s introducing a government heavy, actually describes the Yes Men perfectly in an oft-told story about “Truth and Lie” going skinny-dipping. When Truth wasn’t looking, “Lie jumped out the water, put Truth’s clothes on, and took off running down Elysian Fields Avenue. When Truth realized what was happening, he jumped out of the water and started chasing Lie. So in reality, what was happening was naked Truth was running after a well dressed Lie.”

At the end of the film, Dow doesn’t bow its head and fork over the money the Yes Men claimed. Nor does Exxon. HUD keeps the projects closed. But millions of people - in conferences, at press events, watching the news - get a brief glimpse of naked truth, and what it would look like if he won the race.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in theaters anymore.