academy try to track them down, when Lucy and Amy are cornered by Max, Janet, and Dominique. At Amy's insistence, they give their blessings to Lucy and Amy, and allow them to make their escape. Lucy and Amy ride off into the night, heads on one another's shoulders. Cast Ritchie was the only cast member from the short film to reprise her role in the expansion. Production Inception Director, writer, and editor Angela Robinson began to draw comics about the D.E.B.S. in college as a sideline to her writing. She received a $20,000 grant from Power Up to make an 11-minute short based on the concept, which toured a number of film festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival. Clint Culpepper, then president of Screen Gems, liked the short and gave the green light to develop it into a feature film. Reception Critical response D.E.B.S. received a 42% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes based on 64 reviews. The site's critics consensus reads: "Lacking enough material for a full-length movie, D.E.B.S. is short on both plot and laughs." On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 42% based on reviews from 21 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". In a positive review, Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post praised the film for poking fun at various tropes in spy films and not taking itself too seriously, saying “much of the fun of the innocent little thing is the riffs that [Angela] Robinson plays on familiar genre strokes. A gunfight in a nightclub, with sparks flying, guns blasting, glasses busting, shooters diving, has all the hallmarks of John Woo-style mayhem in full bloom.” He added the film “arrives with sparkly production values and extreme confidence in every scene. It's so spoofy it's difficult to call it ‘good’ or even ‘bad’; just say it's smooth.” Hunter further discussed how the film presents queerness in a normalized way, saying the film is “not gay in that in-your-face, zealous manner of so many films more interested in advocacy than art or commerce. It's gay in what might be called a homo-normative way. That is, it accepts same-sex attraction as a norm, something not at all ‘unusual’ or strange but something so a part of the landscape it doesn't require comment.” A positive reaction from a producer at a film festival screening led to Robinson making a deal to direct the 2005 Disney remake Herbie: Fully