Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 42% of 64 critics' reviews are positive. The website's consensus reads: "Lacking enough material for a full-length movie, D.E.B.S. is short on both plot and laughs." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 42 out of 100, based on 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.”
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave a one-star rating and said, "You might think there's no downside to a movie that peeks up the skirts of babes in micro-minis, but writer-director Angela Robinson's dimwitted satire is libido-killing proof to the contrary."
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 Loaded.
From retrospective reviews, Paste wrote "in the 20 years since this film debuted, there is still a distinct lack of lesbian films (let alone lesbian rom-coms) that are as effortlessly queer, undeniably heartfelt and innately rewatchable" and that "D.E.B.S. remains a cornerstone of lesbian cinema, and a cult classic always worth revisiting". Maddy Myers, for Polygon, commented that the film "feels like a movie that teenage-me, a queer kid who adored screwball comedies, was meant to watch a billion times".
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