D.E.B.S. (1999)

  This was a fairly cute little PG-13 movie.  Most of the actors are solid, if wasted here.  The plot is a fairly standard "good guy falls for bad guy" and the humor is played so broadly that it falls a trifle flat.  But not bad, over all.  I'd say it's pretty decent if you have teens.

The D.E.B.S. are a super-secret organization of high school girls, recruited through the SATs.  Their elite team consists of Max, the hard-charging team leader; Amy, the "perfect score"; Janet, still looking to earn her stripes; and Dom, the chain-smoking French-speaking Asian.

The girls' nemesis is crime boss and evil mastermind Lucy Diamond (Jordana Brewster). 

You can probably tell immediately who I was rooting for.

The girls are staked out at a restaurant where intel says that Lucy is meeting with a Russian assassin but finding out who the target is supposed to be takes a backseat to Amy wrangling with Homeland Security agent Bobby, about returning a bracelet after their recent breakup.  The bracelet falls into Lucy's soup and the restaurant erupts in gunfire.

Separated from her team, Amy runs into Lucy and they punctuate a Mexican stand-off with some girl chat.  Lucy mentions that it wasn't a business meeting, it was a blind date, and Amy blurts that she's doing her thesis on Lucy Diamond and the psychology of the female mastermind.  The team shows up and Lucy escapes.  Amy is lauded as being the only one to have ever gone toe-to-toe with Diamond and lived to tell the tale.

The next night, she is kidnapped by Lucy because that's how you get a date if you're the head of an international crime syndicate.  Janet is also kidnapped because she's in the wrong place at the wrong time and it ends up a very awkward double date with her second-in-command, Scud.  After the date, Amy and Janet are returned to the not-secret-at-all DEBS house where Janet is sworn to secrecy on pain of never getting her stripes and Amy struggles with her feelings for Lucy.

During another mission, Lucy manages to convince Amy to leave the team and run away with her.  The DEBS commander (Holland Taylor) loses her shit completely since Amy was supposed to be their poster child and orders an all-out assault.  The other three team-mates burst into Lucy's lair (also not well concealed) and find Amy...in bed with the enemy.  Ta da!

Cue the dejected"how will I ever choose betweeen who I am and who everyone wants me to be?" music and montage. 

I have to say that Meagan Good, who plays Max, probably gets the gold star for acting.  I recognized her from Brick, one of my all-time favorite movies.  Of all the characters, she's the only one that's not complete camp.  Devon Aoki has a lot of screen time but almost no lines, which makes me wonder if she has a speech impediment or something.  I've only ever seen her in Sin City where she also had no lines and War, which I didn't even remember she was in until I saw it listed on her IMDB page.  To be fair, I've tried to block that movie from my memory so maybe that's not her fault. 

In other news, I finally finished my MST3K marathon.  That only took since May.