D.E.B.S. (2005)

The 2004 spy spoof D.E.B.S. arrives from Angela Robinson, who wrote, directed, and edited the thing, a level of authorial control that in a lesser decade would have been cause for suspicion. The premise concerns a clandestine academy hidden inside the SAT, where young women are recruited under the acronym Discipline, Energy, Beauty, Strength, and dispatched against a supervillain named Lucy Diamond. Robinson adapted her own 2003 short film, and the feature retains the short's modest ambitions and its micro-mini costuming.

The emotional engine is the courtship between spy-in-training Amy and Lucy, played with real warmth by Sara Foster and Jordana Brewster. Robinson treats this affair as the plot's center of gravity, and Screen Gems, to its credit, did not sand it down. The result is a romance that presents same-sex attraction as an ordinary fact of the landscape, requiring no defense and no sermon. It is the reason the film endures in queer repertory programming two decades on. The supporting squad, Meagan Good and Devon Aoki among them, is notably multiethnic for its era, though the film never comments on the fact. Race sits in the frame without becoming a subject.

Elsewhere the film is content to be a comedy. No environmental concern intrudes. No critique of wealth or class. No historical revisionism, no neurodivergent characters, no sustained interrogation of body standards, though the acronym's inclusion of Beauty earns a light smirk. Robinson's feminism is structural, an all-female unit and a queer female action lead, and she plays it for pleasure instead of argument. Critics in 2005 called it thin; audiences have since called it a cornerstone. Both are correct.