JUST as ”Clueless” was a reworking of Jane Austen’s ”Emma,” ”10 Things I Hate About You” is a high-school update of ”Taming of the Shrew.” It’s a romp that strip-mines a dozen teen romantic comedies, shamelessly recycling whole scenes from genre classics like ”Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and ”Animal House.”

But still, ”10 Things” is a funny movie, cute and genuinely romantic, featuring the megawatt screen presence and sex appeal of Julia Stiles as the shrew. Stiles is the gorgeous young actress who was the only good thing in NBC’s awful ”The ’60s” miniseries.

Shakespeare’s sisterly opposites are still called Kat (Stiles) and Bianca (Larisa Oleynik), but the setting is a Seattle high school called Padua, not the Italian city. Their overprotective gynecologist dad (Larry Miller) refuses to let popular Bianca go out on a date unless Kat is dating, too – something that is not likely to happen given Kat’s sharp tongue and bad attitude.

New kid Cameron (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is smitten by Bianca (”I burn, I pine, I perish,” he exclaims, in one of the script’s fluid shifts from teen-speak to Shakespeare). He knows that Bianca doesn’t date, so he and best friend Michael (David Krumholtz) persuade obnoxious rich kid Joey (the terrific Andrew Keegan), who also likes Bianca, to pay school tough Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger) to take out Kat, as an experiment in ”extreme dating.”

Although they make Kat a handful, the filmmakers were clearly wary about making her a real shrew. Instead she’s a bad-tempered smart babe who has given up social life (except for concerts by angry-chick rock bands) and adopted the persona of a strident campus feminist. She complains bitterly to streetwise English teacher Mr. Malcolm (Daryl ”Chill” Mitchell) about having to study ”patriarchal” authors like Hemingway.

As a result, ”10 Things” increasingly becomes a generic story of mutual seduction rather than Shakespeare’s problematic tale of womanly submission.

Generic – and derivative. As in ”She’s All That” and ”Carrie 2,” there’s a party scene here where the girl discovers that the nice boy who’s lured her out of her protective shell was doing it for a bet. There’s also one of those slapstick, chasing-each-other-and-throwing-stuff scenes which have become Hollywood longhand for ”look, these two are falling in love!”

Veteran TV director Gil Junger keeps things moving swiftly and gets good comic timing from his cast. He makes the most of the screenplay’s small gems – like Allison Janney’s dippy, pornography-writing school counselor. The whole movie is effectively accompanied by girl-band covers of old songs like Cheap Trick’s ”I Want You to Want Me.”

But Stiles is the main attraction here. When a smile finally spreads across her face, it’s like a slow-motion nuclear explosion.

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10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU

Starring Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger. Directed by Gil Junger. Screenplay by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith. Running time: 98 minutes. Rated: PG-13. At Union Square 14, Sutton, Bay Plaza (Bronx), others.