Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (also known simply as Borat 2) is spirited, good natured and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.

I generally don’t “laugh” as a rule (I’m an LQTM-er) but I did guffaw three or four times.

But you know why Borat 2 really works? What gives it heart and dimension beneath the satire? A father-daughter story about pride and feminism.

Jokes aside, Borat 2 is about a middle-aged Kazakhstan none-too-bright primitive (i.e., SBC’s “Borat Sagdiyev“) who, over the course of the film, comes to regard his spirited if somewhat ignorant teenage daughter (Maria Bakalova‘s “Tutar Sagdiyev”) not as a dog or a piece of property to be presented to vp Mike Pence or Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, but as a person of spiritual beauty and inner substance.

Early on Borat has been told by Kazakhstan authorities that he can make up for tarnishing his country’s reputation with the original Borat (’06) by taking his daughter to the U.S. and somehow gifting her to Pence or Giuliani as a token of Kazakhstan’s esteem for the Trump administration. Or something like that.

But the emotional father-daughter current gradually overrides the political and the monetary, in large part due to sensible counsel from Jeanise Jones, a professional babysitter who straightens Tutar out and wakes her up.

For all the silliness, Borat 2 works because it understands heart and compassion.