Shakespeare fans, please draw a deep breath and count to ten: Ten Things I Hate About You, the latest dumb-ass Yank teen comedy, purports to be a modern-day remake of The Taming Of The Shrew. The poor old Bard has had his back catalogue mercilessly pillaged and defiled in recent years, but this is taking the piss: the mere idea that Shakespeare (even indirectly) provided source inspiration for Ten Things . . ., lends a whole new meaning to the phrase 'dumbing-down'.

Set in a West Coast high-school, the plot concerns a man-hating, sharp-tongued superbitch (Julia Stiles) who progressively chills out over the film's duration and gets in touch with what passes for her pleasant side, though not before spending a good hour unleashing several gobbets of caustic verbal bile at all-comers, in the process providing the only decent dialogue the movie has to offer. Her younger sister (Larisa Oleynik) is pretty, popular and sweet-natured, but their benevolently tyrannical father has imposed a house-rule that Bianca can't date until Katarina does, which spells curtains for her burgeoning romance with geeky-swot kid Cameron ("Awww, you asked me out - that's so sweet! What was your name again?")

Meanwhile, a clandestine plot being hatched by the school's males requires moody, mysterious loner Patrick (Heath Ledger) to expend his energies chasing after the venom-tongued, poison-hearted Kat, who gives the impression that she'd sooner clean out the sewers than indulge in physical contact with the opposite sex. Problem instantly solved: Patrick is cynical and iconoclastic enough for Kat's liking, and more importantly, he combines the physique of a quarterback with the smouldering looks of a Michael Hutchence. Thus, the film careers towards an eminently predictable conclusion on all counts (at the Prom night, believe it or not).

While I acknowledge that perhaps I am not exactly the film's intended target audience, I still found it heartily irritating, for a multitude of reasons. The lightweight tone is fair enough in the context of something like this, but the script's occasional flashes of wit and intelligence make its general dumbness and laziness all the harder to take. The single most infuriating feature of Ten Things is the dialogue's incessant lapses into the type of inane "uhh, HELLO! - like, LOOO-SER, you suck, totally" hybrid of gibberish and babytalk, which linguistic historians may record as having come to replace proper English as America's first language sometime around the release of the Bill & Ted series.

The film is not totally devoid of merit: Larry Miller's turn as the girl's pregnancy-obsessed father is an amusing one, Stiles and Oleynik are perky enough presences, and Ledger might very well be a name to look out for. And while the more discerning teenage viewers will shun it like the plague, the film did seem to do the trick for most of the audience at the press showing, and sent many people out smiling. But not me.