Yesterday, we had the opportunity – thanks to the offer of my folks to babysit – to have a date night! We shopped (for comforters for the kids), we ate (appetizers), and we saw a movie: Taken, starring Liam Neeson.

If you haven’t heard of the film, I’ll summarize the plot without giving any spoilers (though the storyline is somewhat predictable). The movie centers around a father’s search for his daughter after she is kidnapped overseas and sold as a sex slave. The father, an ex-CIA “preventer” – that is, someone who “prevents bad things from happening” – has ample field skills and puts nearly all of them to good use hunting down the animals behind his daughter’s kidnapping. The father’s adventure can only be described as Jack Bauer-esque as he miraculously dodges automatic weapon fire, is in the right place at the right time at least half a dozen times, and even manages to escape an unescapable situation.

While the premise of the film is my worst nightmare (times four…), I admit I had mixed feelings as the father progresses through the multiple layers of the seedy underground to find his daughter. On the one hand, the creative, no-nonsense, kick-butt approach to stopping every possible bad guy along the way to rescuing his daughter is exactly what every dad secretly wishes he’d be able to do if a nightmare like this ever happened. Obviously, the reality would be that someone like myself would really only be able to contact the authorities and spend a whole lot of time on my knees. However, the extreme nature of the revenge exacted on the perpetrators made me remember the Scripture, “‘Vengeance is mine,’ sayeth the Lord.” I will admit that the former of the two reactions won out most of the time.

My moral dilemmas aside, and while I had difficulty suspending my disbelief the entire time, it was nonetheless an enjoyable popcorn flick with an action-filled storyline.