The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for the new movie “The Miracle Season” are only 44% and once again the critics are wrong. I thought this was an outstanding real life sports movie, one of the best I have ever seen.

Over the years in my experience, the most successful sports movies are true stories and The Miracle Season is an amazing true story about a girls high school volleyball team from Iowa City Iowa in 2011. This movie stars Helen Hunt and William Hurt as the father a standout high school girl volleyball player who is tragically killed when she loses control of her moped. I wondered how any father of a child could have survived what he went through losing his daughter in a tragic accident and then his wife to cancer some weeks later.

Most movies that involve huge creatures that have grown because of a nuclear incident or because of some DNA experiment rely on the audience to suspend all sense of common sense to believe what is happening on the screen. In my experience the enjoyment of a movie like this is dependent many times on how much we have to suspend our thinking for two hours.

The new movie “Rampage” starring Duane Johnson requires a great deal of common sense suspension and because of this at least for me, the special effects were not enough to offset some of the downright stupid things that happen in this movie. For instance, there is a giant gorilla, wolf and alligator in this movie and for some reason massive rockets and non-stop machine gun fire cannot kill any of them. Regardless of how these 3 animals got to be so huge, there is no way any of them could stay alive if they were ever hit with any kind of an explosive rocket – much less many hundreds of bullets. This is also confirmed later in the movie were we see what does injure them, which adds to the nonsensical action during the final sequences of this film. When you have to forego this much common sense for a science fiction action movie, the amount of eye rolling becomes too much to continue to enjoy the movie. For this reason, I cannot recommend Rampage. This movie might be a good to see for a young child who is less than 10 years old, but for the rest of us, it should be missed.

The main thing that stood out about this movie for me was seeing the bombed out disastrous city of Beirut Lebanon in the early 70’s and 80’s. Within all scenes of this film it was amazing to see the shape this city has probably always been in – due to never ending wars that have gone on for decades. As far as the movie and the plot that involved CIA agents and a kidnapping, I did not see anything in this story that was significant enough or something I have not seen before. The star of this movie is John Hamm in the first movie I can remember where he is the lead actor and I thought his performance was very good.

Unfortunately this movie was too run of the mill to recommend, despite the relatively high ratings on Rotten Tomatoes.