How appropriate, if not quite illuminating, that Jennifer Aniston is in the tabloids denying a split with Vince Vaughn at the same time their on-screen feud, “The Break-Up,” arrives on DVD.
Whether Aniston and Vaughn get a real-life happy ending is much in doubt.
But it was always clear “The Break-Up” couldn’t deliver an ending that satisfied audiences. It wasn’t so much that we demanded a romantic comedy wrap-up with the principals united in bliss; it’s that we wanted a finish that fit the biting, bickering tone of the rest of the movie.
The DVD of “The Break-Up” tries to solve the problem with a prominently advertised alternate ending. Too bad the optional scene doesn’t work very well, either. Director Peyton Reed never could decide whether the Aniston-Vaughn characters should wind up together or apart, or whether they should say goodbye with roses or lethal weapons.
The best thing about the never-seen finale is a completely irrelevant musical number featuring the campy vocal stylings of “The Tone Rangers,” the a cappella group led by Aniston’s sexually undefined on-screen brother, John Michael Higgins.
Though “The Break-Up” did good business last summer for a romantic comedy, most critics panned it as a tired rehash of the Venus-Mars debate over stereotypical gender habits.
Vaughn plays Gary, co-owner with his brothers of a Chicago bus tour business, who loves da Bears and video games. Aniston is Brooke, the classy manager of an upscale art gallery who worries about decorative centerpieces for dinner parties and wishes Gary liked the ballet.
The twist for “The Break-Up” is that the happy period of their relationship is doled out during the opening credits, in a series of still photographs. The movie itself is all about the fights that tear Gary and Brooke apart. Vaughn is his usual abrasive, blustery self; somehow Aniston’s usual perky, gorgeous self doesn’t wear quite so well. She comes across as the harpie, while Vaughn as co-writer allows himself to be the regular guy.
As one of the summer’s bigger movies, “The Break-Up” is surprisingly inert. It will no doubt do well in DVD rentals – I just can’t figure out why.
Reach Michael Booth at mbooth@denverpost.com
