The Taming of the Shrew in an American School... (10 Things I Hate About You (DVD))

Member Name: CaptainD

Product:	10 Things I Hate About You (DVD)
Date:	09/03/09 (68 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good cast, decent soundtrack, some great scenes and dialogue ...

Disadvantages: ... the rest is uninspiring teen movie fodder ...

Sometimes you watch a film you loved as a teenager and enjoy it just as much, and sometimes... you don't. I found the latter to be the case with Ten Things I Hate About You - it certainly has some memorable moments, but much of the movie left me unmoved. I guess that's what happens when you watch this sort of movie when you're no longer a teenager...
The plot is simple enough and typical teen-movie material; Bianca Stratford (Larisa Oleynik) wants to start dating, but her father Walter (Larry Miller) wants to keep his daughters out of harms' way. So he decides that until her older sister Kat (Julia Stiles) is dating, nor can Bianca. This proves somewhat troublesome for her since Kat has made herself one of the least popular people in school. Meanwhile Cameron James (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has just joined the school and instantly falls for Bianca. His friend Michael (David Krumhoiltz) hatches a plot to get the school bad boy Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger) to date Kat... the only problem being that the bankroll for this operation is coming from the hunky but obnoxious Joey Donner (Andrew Keegan), who also has designs on young Bianca.

The typical (American) teen comedy props are all there, including the ever-present prom night. It struck me while watching it this time that the production values weren't very good for large parts of the movie, and with some awful dialogue in places it tended to come across like a feature-length episode of Saved by the Bell. However the screenwriters Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith redeem themselves admirably on several occasions with some sparkling one-liners. Quite what The Bard would have made of this rewriting of his play "The Taming of the Shrew" is anyone's guess, but through different plot devices there is a lot of love for William Shakespeare shown in 10 Things I Hate About You.
The cast are mostly excellent, with strong performances from leads Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger. The supporting cast do very good jobs, albeit their characters are rather stereotyped; Larisa Oleynik is a pretty young thing, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is very earnest, David Krumholtz is very nerdy, Andrew Keegan is utterly self-obsessed... Daryl Mitchell is great as the English Teacher of the class Kat, Patrick and Joey attend.

There are a lot of set pieces that are genuinely funny, such as Patrick taking over the school's PA system, serenading Kat and then trying to evade the school's security, and Kat's subsequent tactics for getting Patrick out of detention. There are quite a few memorable lines and scenes in the film, unfortunately held together by lacklustre typical teen comedy that's not nearly clever enough to be amusing. The end result is a film that is certainly still worth watching, but overall it fell some way short of my teenaged memories. The soundtrack contains a lot of fun memories for those of us who remember the music of the nineties with anything approaching fondness (I have mixed feelings about nineties music myself, but I liked a fair amount of the songs in this movie's soundtrack.
[The film's rating 12A for crude sex-related humour and dialogue, alcohol and drug-related scenes.]

Summary: Teens will love it, while adults will definitely enjoy some parts.