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STUDIO: Sony
MSRP: $24.99
RATED: PG-13
RUNNING TIME: 91 min.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Commentary tracks
• Deleted scenes
• Featurette
• Music video
The Humans
Sara Foster (The Big Bounce, some magazines), Devon Aoki (2 Fast 2 Furious, Sin City), Meagan Good (Biker Boyz, House Party 4), Jill Ritchie (Kid Rock’s sister), Jordana Brewster (The Faculty, The Fast and the Furious), Michael Clarke Duncan (See Spot Run, The Scorpion King)
The Pitch
Female students whose test scores indicate a predilection for ruthlessness and deception are inducted into a secret agency. Max (Good, who’s extremely hot and the only convincing "action figure" in the film), Amy (Foster, who’s reasonably hot but a terrible actress), Dominique (annoying Asian/extraterrestrial/Cthulhuan Aoki, who for some inexplicable reason is playing a French girl) and Janet (Ritchie, who’s not outrageously hot nor especially talented but has nice legs) are the best the academy has to offer, and so they’re sent after international villainess/lesbian Lucy Diamond (Brewster, one of the most perfect creatures in this spiral galaxy). When Amy becomes the only agent in history to survive an encounter with Lucy, she’s promoted to team leader and assigned with bringing her in. But instead she finds herself being seduced by her luscious nemesis, which doesn’t make her comrades, her recent ex-boyfriend or her immediate superiors particularly happy.
Don’t sweat it, girl… I have no idea what the hell she is either.
The Package
The transfer looks good (the movie was shot on HD, so it should) and the bullet-riddled Dolby 5.1 audio has plenty of punch, although several soundtrack selections seem entirely inappropriate for their scenes. Robinson sticks mainly with technical talk on her solo commentary, while the actresses (sans Aoki) titter through their chummy gang track. The behind-the-scenes featurette is a pretty standard 12 minutes making-of with “talking head” interviews, while other superfluous trinkets include animatics, deleted scenes, a music video and Robinson’s comic pitch. Curiously omitted is her well-received D.E.B.S. short that was apparently clever and witty enough to merit a feature-length film that wasn’t really either.
The Lowdown
Camp. Spoof. Exlpoitation. These are terms you might think would be associated with something like D.E.B.S. (which it turns out stands for Discipline, Energy, Beauty, Strength, an acronym that’s essentially meaningless in context), but you’d only be partially correct. This is mostly because writer-director Angela Robinson doesn’t seem to have any idea just what she wants her movie to be, so it’s a whole bunch of different things and yet somehow also not much at all — for an action flick it’s not very exciting, for a lesbian romance it barely earns that PG-13, and for a comedy the humor is sparse (most of the film’s amusing moments go to Lucy’s loyal cohort Scud — no relation to Blade’s gadget guy). It’s just not nearly the sexy fun it should be.
How I spend Friday nights. (Saturday is for Biel, Sunday’s Kreuk.)
The premise is sound (from my admittedly limited perspective, anyway) – hot young girls in short skirts wield oversized firearms and kick ass. Spy Chicks, basically. Which should really be just my speed. But what begins like an over-the-top Charlie’s Angels-style action-espionage parody (suspended from a restaurant ceiling, the girls spy on Lucy during her blind date with a Russian female assassin) then swerves into a clunky, bland romance with only some light femme pawing and tame osculation for a payoff. From there the movie follows the path of any generic teen romance movie (with random fight scenes and cheeky moments thrown in almost as a reminder), culminating in the graduation dance that’s concluded by Amy delivering her expected speech before expressing her true feelings to everyone and following her heart.
5.7 out of 10