10 Things I Hate About You: 10 things we love to hate about this film

It gave us Heath Ledger singing and Julia Stiles’ iconic comebacks, but is there more to hate than love about 10 Things I Hate About You?

Ah, Shakespeare. The Bard has given us so much fodder for film adaptations and cinema really did try them all, especially in the ’90s. Baz Luhrmann tried his hand at Romeo and Juliet, Kenneth Branagh directed and starred in Much Ado About Nothing, and we’re not forgetting the surprise hit of 1996: Shakespeare in Love.

Yet there’s one adaptation that has always stood head and shoulders above the rest. 10 Things I Hate About You, taking its main plot from The Taming of the Shrew, turns 20 this year. It’s hard to believe it has really been that long since Joseph Gordon-Levitt first appeared on our screens, or since Heath Ledger serenaded Julia Stiles in a sequence that has to be a contender for most parodied scene to ever exist.

As much as 10 Things was a cultural phenomenon (they even got Letters To Cleo, guys), there are some elements of it which leave a bit of a bad taste in the mouth on a re-watch, especially in 2019. It’s really the story of the taming of a young woman: turning her from “heinous” into a date-worthy young lady, via a set-up involving three men and her own sister. On paper, it all seems a bit distasteful.

So we decided to break down the 10 things we love to hate about 10 Things I Hate About You…