IT'S EASY TO hate George W. Bush: he might almost have been created precisely to be so barn door-wide a target no one can be bothered to see what's behind it. Even the surname is as blunt as a bull's-eye. Is there anything it won't rhyme with? It's arguable he's never suffered a moment in his life – hangovers and skinned knees don't count. Which perhaps explains why he can apparently be "nice" (or so informed sources claim) while also being loathsome, moronic, conscienceless, a stooge, and just generally objectionable in every right- (as opposed to "right") thinking way imaginable, including all spiritual, theoretical, and historical modes. Giant anvil + his head = my sincerest congratulations.

But it's that "stooge" part that's the rub, as everything catchy and simple about despising W. doesn't apply to the incredibly complicated and kinda boring real stuff behind his smirking barn door. The genius of new Canadian documentary The Corporation is that it puts a sort of identifiable human-esque face on the infinitely tentacled green, white, and cyber-paper trail beast we ought really to be voting, legislating, protesting, and counter-investing to its knees. It does that by putting said monster on a figurative analyst's couch, then developing a case history-cum-psychological profile that would make anyone order instant lockdown.

This may sound like a silly, not to mention abstract, idea. But like all good cultural critiques (and it is a culture, both exclusive and all-powerful), The Corporation makes you see past the familiar with a bracing slap or two. Then it angries up the blood toward corrective action.

It's a crash course every citizen should have to take, though naturally it will mostly play to the pre-converted. In a just world, every ticket to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 – destined now to become the one political documentary normally apolitical people will see, by the millions – would come with free admission to this invaluable primer, which measures the self-perpetuating system ultimately responsible for most of our international imbroglios.

Moore is indeed (perhaps inevitably) a commentator here, and a pithy one too – even if seeing his smug mug in somebody else's agit-doc begins to smell like overexposure. Ditto Noam Chomsky, although since codirector Mark Achbar made rep-house perennial Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media a decade ago, his presence is to be expected.

Less de rigueur are the many two cents from a who's who of spokespersons for myriad key viewpoints, including prominent apologists, profiteers, lackeys, an inter-corporate spy, and several academic theorists not named Chomsky.

These talking heads rarely get cranking for more than a sound bite's length, however. The shocking thing about The Corporation is that it makes a labyrinthine subject's dissection not just reasonably cogent but fun. Drawing its basic thesis from Joel Bakan's crisp if dry tome The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Achbar and Jennifer Abbott channel their message through a bold organizational scheme that lets the focus jump around in interconnective, humorous, hit-and-run fashion. The seriousness of related human rights abuses, global warming, rich-poor gap, governmental corruption, and other issues is flagged en route, much as one might note flaming wreckage passing by an ambulance window in a war zone.

The most impudent device stringing all this together toward a red-alert message is a "personality diagnostic checklist" that equates corporate "serial behaviors" – lying, manipulation, inability to relate to others' concerns – with those of an antisocial, psychopathic individual. If the archetypal corporation were a character in a movie, it would first poison the dog, then seduce the wife. Then, before you knew it, it would assume knife-wielding total control of Michael Douglas's once happy home.

The starting point, in fact, is an 1886 U.S. Supreme Court decision that effectively gave corporations – hitherto strictly controlled, largely time-limited entities mostly assembled for public works projects – the same rights as human individuals. This opened a Pandora's box of potential abuses. All this is further salted by a heady mix of news telecasts, breaking-event footage, and much archival arcana. The latter includes vintage commercials, industrial training reels, and propagandic "soft news" plants, rendering the movie a delightfully ironic That's Entertainment! of corporate "perception management" tactics throughout the past century.

If The Corporation's reach sounds almost impossibly broad – it might just as easily have taken form as a broadcast miniseries of 10 or more hours – credit is due the filmmakers for creating a package at once deliberately overwhelming, sharp-eyed at any given moment, and consistently engaging. No review is going to convince you this subject is, er, sexy. But trust me: these 145 minutes (yes, that's the short version) are among the most fascinating you'll ever spend being enraged.

'An Evening with the Directors of The Corporation' takes place Thurs/3, 7-10 p.m., Film Arts Foundation, 145 Ninth St., S.F. $15-$20. (415) 552-8760, ext. 311, www.filmarts.org.