But then one of my favorite actors, Liam Neeson, whom I haven’t seen in ages, showed up in Taken, and I bit the bullet (heh, heh). He compelled me to buy a movie ticket for the first time since my 13-year-old daughter and I went to see Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 last summer.

Neeson looked older, frayed around the edges, but still commanding and handsome in that offbeat way of his. He manages to convey what might have been pages of dialogue without opening his mouth. And there’s quite a lot to convey: He plays a once-estranged father, trying his damndest to renew his relationship with his teenage daughter. Just as he thinks he’s making progress, the girl falls prey to sex traffickers who kidnap her on a trip to Paris.

I admit some of the plot made me queasy: Father desperate to rescue the helpless, virginal daughter, but then I remembered the facts. Sex trafficking is not fiction. It’s a massive problem all over the globe, and I respect the attention Taken brings to it, whether it was intentional or not.

For more information on sex trafficking (or, more precisely, girls and young women being “taken” and sold into sexual slavery) and what you can do about it, check out Equality Now. It’s a valuable organization, and it needs us all to speak up.

Email or write your senator (and if you’re not sure who she is, you can find out easily by clicking here) and let her know that you want her to do everything possible to end the trafficking of human beings.

To learn more, go to the Huffington Post and The New York Times, both of which published articles about trafficking last July.

Oh, and see Taken. It’s 91 minutes of sheer excitement.