If there's a way to hackney Shakespeare...

Rating: 5/10 (15 April 2008)

Any movie that uses as its base such strong source material as a William Shakespeare play can't be completely written off. Still, while 10 Things I Hate about You followed the heels of Clueless in adapting popular classic fiction to the then-flagging teen/chick genre, it ultimately sputtered on poor writing and sloppy characterisation so that anyone sophisticated enough to appreciate its literary heritage will moan and groan at the paradoxical plot headaches.
First of all, I really have to suspend disbelief to imagine that an OB-GYN like Dr. Stratford who, after seeing too many teenage pregnancies and being left to raise his two children all alone, is so tightly-wound as not to let his daughters date until they graduate, would continue sending them to a coeducational school, much less a *public* school where the "same little ***wipes'-****-for-brains" roams every hallway, in the words of Padua High's own guidance counselor.
Second, while it is hard to complain about seeing Julia Stiles and Larisa Oleynik for a couple of hours, their characters really needed more than this script gave them. All of the characters are written up verbally to add a bit of Elizabethan flavour, and Stiles' Katerina is portrayed as a rebel against meaningless pop-consumer culture and seeking a more nuanced intellectual path... yet at the end she turns out a poem that reads like something I wrote at age fifteen. She plays herself up as so much more mature than her classmates and she's going to school on the opposite coast in a few months, yet even after she discovers she's been set up to fulfill her ex-lover's Playboy fantasies with her sister, she slides almost immediately back into a relationship with a willfully complicit boyfriend she'll probably never see again. This was so perfectly satired, by the way, at the end of Not Another Teen Movie.
And, hey, the original ending of The Taming of the Shrew showed Katherina coming to terms with convention--but on a more profound level than the ordinary wife. She submitted to her husband because he subjected himself to her torments. But the play never condemned traditional society, whereas the film's parallel "convention," teenage smarm culture, is expressly condemned throughout the movie, by Katarina and others, and yet it's vindicated by the end.
The development of her sister Bianca is equally fragmented. She falls in love with the "good guy," Cameron, long before Katarina's lecture on the terrible truth of her former hotrod, Joey. So what does she have to learn from her sister? Does she even learn anything at all? What didn't she know to begin with? Even at that point, she's still sitting in her room pining away for the prom in front of MTV. (And wouldn't an uptight, frustrated, paranoid OB-GYN cut the cable, as well? I know I sure would...)
How pitiful. HOWEVER... when all is said and done, it *is* a modern adaptation of a Shakespeare play, it's one of the films where Heath Ledger's presence does not elicit disgust, and the occasional spitball hurled at contemporary teenage life is indescribably amusing. So, too, is guidance counselor Ms. Perky (at whose indiscretions I ought not amuse myself, but I can't help it). How many public school teachers not-so-secretly want that, I wonder? It's not quite as stylish or subtle as it sometimes thinks itself, but it has its moments. Don't expect Shakespeare, though.