A friend of mine told me about a great analogy between grading movies and dives (please bear with me on this). In fancy diving, the process judges have to take into account the difficulty of the dive the athlete set out to do before grading it.

This is tightly linked to what I once said about under-delivery in business-related matters, and it very much applies to movies as well : as long as a movie delivers on what it set out to do, it’s a good movie, period. It means that it can be nothing more than an action-packed flick without a “message” and still be really good.

This does not mean that any meathead movie gets a pass, though; even action needs to be a bit original to be off the hook.