Review of 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) by Halfwelshman — 16 Jul 2012

I resisted seeing this film for a long time, and to be honest I've no idea why. 10 Things I Hate About You is relatively self-aware for a highschool rom-com, and affectionately pokes fun at some of the genre's most annoying cliches.

It also has a wacky comic energy and some hilarious dialogue which is the perfect mix of the bright and verbally dexterous and the very, very crude. There are decent performances across the cast, particularly from the effortlessly natural Julia Stiles and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Heath Ledger as a borderline sociopathic rebel-turned-lover-boy.

Allison Janney is also brilliant as the entertainingly filthy school counsellor and aspiring erotica writer. It makes a refreshing change for a teenage comedy film to have a believably-aged cast, though the key players were aged 18-20 when the film was made, at least they weren't in their late twenties or early thirties as they sometimes are in Hollywood highschool films.

Where the film pleasingly has its own identity for most its run-time, it does disappointingly sink to the level of every other teenage romantic comedy in its final act. At this point it feels a little like screenwriting pair Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith ran out of interesting ideas and just delivered all the soppy stuff you come to expect from this kind of film.

And though Ledger is delivers a good performance, his accent is all over the place, and this is accounted for with some clumsy exposition about his character spending his early life in Australia. It might have been a little less jarring if Ledger stuck to one dialect or the other.

Despite a generic ending and a couple of story elements that don't quite work, 10 Things I Hate About You is a smart, fun, heart-warming and hilarious romantic comedy, and this is coming from someone who doesn't really like romantic comedies.