10 Things I Hate About You Movie Review
Some teen movies from the nineties feel embarrassing today.
This one doesn’t.
Twenty-five years on, 10 Things I Hate About You still holds up as one of the smartest high school comedies ever made, and a lot of that comes down to the fact that it was never really about the high school at all.
It was about Shakespeare, dressed up in Doc Martens.
Before I get into why this one still works, if you’re looking for more reviews like this, mp4movie has you covered on the full spectrum, from decades-old classics to whatever released last Friday.
Anyway, back to Padua High.
The Setting and Setup
The premise sounds like a gimmick on paper.
A new kid named Cameron falls for a girl named Bianca, but Bianca can’t date until her older sister Kat, who has a reputation for being difficult, agrees to date someone first.
So Cameron and his friend Michael cook up a scheme to pay off Patrick Verona, the school’s resident mystery man, to take Kat off the market.
The whole thing is a loose modern retelling of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, reworked by writers Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith into a late-nineties American high school setting. Wikipedia
It marked the feature directorial debut of Gil Junger, who built the film around a cast that included Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Larisa Oleynik, Andrew Keegan, and Gabrielle Union. Fandom
What’s smart about the setup is that it doesn’t pretend the “shrew” framing is fine.
Kat is written as sharp and stubborn because she has actual reasons to be that way, not because the script needs a hurdle for the boys to clear.
Filming took place around Tacoma and Seattle, and Stadium High School in Tacoma stands in for Padua High, which gives the whole thing a slightly overcast, real-world texture that a lot of glossier teen movies from the same era didn’t bother with. Wikipedia
What Works
Heath Ledger is the reason people still talk about this movie.
He plays Patrick as someone who’s clearly performing detachment rather than actually feeling it, and you can watch him decide, scene by scene, how much of the real person underneath he’s willing to show.
The bleacher serenade is the obvious highlight, but it works because of what happens in the quieter scenes around it, not in spite of them.
Julia Stiles matches him beat for beat.
Kat could easily have been written as simply “angry,” but Stiles plays the character with enough control that you understand exactly where the anger is coming from before the film ever spells it out for you.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Cameron is the audience surrogate, awkward and a little too earnest, and he sells the panic of a guy who has clearly never had to lie to anyone before.
The dialogue is the other thing that ages well.
It’s quick without trying too hard to sound quick, and there’s a real confidence in letting teenagers talk like they’ve actually read a book once in their lives, which very few high school comedies bother to attempt.
Where It Falls Apart
The Cameron and Bianca plot is the weaker half of this movie, and it always has been.
Bianca, played well enough by Oleynik, doesn’t get nearly the same interiority that the script hands to Kat, and her arc mostly exists to move Cameron’s story forward rather than to stand on its own.
The scheme itself, when you actually sit with it, is uncomfortable if you think about it for more than a few seconds.
Patrick is paid to pursue a girl who doesn’t know she’s part of a transaction, and the film treats this as a cute complication rather than something that deserves any real reckoning.
It gets away with it because the chemistry between Ledger and Stiles is doing so much heavy lifting, but the setup hasn’t aged as cleanly as the performances have.
Andrew Keegan’s Joey Donner is a cartoon of a villain, useful as a punching bag but never given a single dimension the script seems interested in.
Music and Sound
Richard Gibbs composed the score, but the soundtrack is really the star here, stitched together from late-nineties alt-rock and ska that dates the movie in the best possible way. Wikipedia
Barenaked Ladies’ rock remix of “One Week” plays over the credits, and the mix of guitar-driven pop and the occasional swelling orchestral cue during Patrick and Kat’s scenes gives the movie a rhythm that a lot of its imitators never managed to find.
None of it is subtle.
It’s not supposed to be.
Does It Come Together
What holds the whole thing together, even with its uneven halves, is that the film actually believes its central romance is worth the buildup.
The classroom poem scene near the end works because it’s the one moment where the script drops the scheme entirely and just lets two characters be honest with each other, no manipulation, no bet, nothing hidden.
It released on March 31, 1999, through Buena Vista Pictures, and went on to earn a solid $53.6 million worldwide against a modest budget, which isn’t a blockbuster number but was enough to make it a defining teen movie of its decade. Wikipedia
You can find the full production rundown on its Wikipedia page if you want the deeper trivia. Wikipedia
Who Should Watch This
If you grew up on this one, it still delivers, mostly because Ledger and Stiles are doing career-best work for a genre that rarely asks its actors for that much.
If you’re coming to it fresh, go in expecting a teen comedy with a genuinely sharp script and one plotline that hasn’t aged particularly well, and you’ll get exactly that.
It’s not a perfect movie.
It’s just a better one than it had any obligation to be.
FAQs
Is 10 Things I Hate About You still worth watching?
Yes. Twenty-five years later, the movie still works because of its sharp dialogue, strong performances from Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles, and its clever Shakespeare-inspired setup.
What Shakespeare play is 10 Things I Hate About You based on?
The movie is a loose modern retelling of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, reworked into a late-nineties American high school setting.
Who gives the standout performance in the movie?
Heath Ledger is one of the biggest reasons the movie remains memorable, while Julia Stiles matches him with a layered performance as Kat.
What is the weakest part of 10 Things I Hate About You?
The Cameron and Bianca storyline is the weaker half, and the central scheme involving Patrick pursuing Kat for money has not aged as cleanly as the performances.
When was 10 Things I Hate About You released?
It was released on March 31, 1999, through Buena Vista Pictures.
