Decline of audience' standards?

So I happened to watch two movies back to back yesterday, two movies I hadn't seen before: First I watched "From Paris With Love", then "The One". The former was a mindless and latent racist action flick (or, from a non-US-perspective, it was mostly a mindless jerk-off-file for americans). It had some good action scenes but the rest was hard to watch. The One wasn't a masterpiece either but still way better and didn't have any pretentious overtones. Then, as usual, I went to IMDb to cast my votes on these two movies and to look up the comments. And I was shocked to see that From Paris With Love was rated 6.4 while The One is rated as low as 5.6 ... and that's a HUGE difference since everything above 6 is a still a solid movie while anything below is bordering trash!

I know that the theme from The One isn't anyones's cup of tea but I thought the stupidity of FPWL wouldn't be either. Reading the FPWL boards I realized that many watchers *do* realize the flaws of the movie but just shrug it off "hey, it's still entertaining, so what". While The One isn't exactly on old movie it isn't exactly new either, so my theory is that today's audience has numbed (or dumbed) down yet another notch since 2001. Producers seem to be able to get away with almost anything these days as long as the movie contains some entertaining elements. And I think it won't take long (probably another 10 years) until all those awful elements have become standard and "entertaining" as well ...

Anyone here that has seen both movies? I'd like to read your comment on this topic, whether you agree or not.