Day 26: Taken Back

I'm going out on a limb and doing the whole "compare the Bible and God to a movie" thing. Yea I know, it has been done before. Regardless, today's movie is Taken so if you haven't seen it, then you better skip this post. Here there be spoilers.
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So I watched the movie Taken today. It apparently hasn't been out on DVD for too long and my family had it on a rental, so I checked it out.

I thought the movie looked pretty cool, but it wasn't one of those movies that just made me drool at the mouth or anything. Now don't get me wrong, I love a good action movie. I know that people out there aren't exactly giving movies like Transporter 2 a golden globe, but hey, I like the occasional action-packed, plot-out-the-window movie.

Taken is a pretty wild ride once it gets going. It has just a bit of build up at the beginning and then it's action packed till the end. Here's the premise: A father who was once a top agent (spy) for the government has retired and moved closer to where his ex-wife and her husband live to be closer to her daughter of seventeen years. On a trip away from the country, the daughter is kidnapped by a crime organization which specializes in trafficking women while she is on the phone with her dad. He tells the kidnappers, who pick up the phone, that they better release his daughter or else he's coming after them. They, of course, don't, and he's given an approximately 96 hour window to get his daughter back or lose her forever in a maze of trafficking movement all over the world.

The daddio (who is played by Liam Neeson) hops on a plane and lands in Paris in full wrath. He has no mercy for the kidnappers and does whatever it takes to get his daughter back. He chases down the orignal kidnappers, infiltrates brothels, and escapes capture while quickly going from the bottom ranks to the top of the criminal organization, following every little lead he can get. And he leaves a trail of destruction behind him.

I hope you don't think that is saccreligious if I compare God to the dad in this movie. I'll admit that there are some incongrueties; our God is merciful, the dad here is not, etc. But, I think I too often think of God as a passive entity, the sort of old-man-in-a-rocking-chair-God sort of mentality that I think is easy to fall into. When we look at the God of the Bible, he is also a God of wrath and action. He did whatever it would take to rescue his people (once the Israelites, now us) and get them back. The coming of Jesus was nothing short of an invasion of an enemy occupied world with a God ready to take his people back.

So if you haven't seen Taken, I recommend it. It has a lot of action and a lot of violence, but I give it two thumbs up for an audience that is old enough. I don't know if you'll see the same themes I did, but it certainly reminded me that God is not passive, but the active and living God of the universe.

See you tomorrow.