There's something about Vince

Why doesn't Vince Vaughn annoy me? This is what I find myself wondering during a recent preview screening of ''Wedding Crashers," a summer-weight comedy scheduled to open Friday, starring Vaughn and the effortlessly annoying Owen Wilson.

Putting aside, for the moment, dramatic credits that include the ridiculous ''Domestic Disturbance" and Gus Van Sant's redundant ''Psycho" remake, you'd think at this point we'd all be pretty tired of revisiting the cocky man-child who fast-talked his way through ''Swingers," ''Made," and ''Old School," among other films.

Even allowing that he's by far the best thing in the Doug Liman-directed ''Mr. & Mrs. Smith," one could argue that Vaughn's shtick should have long ago started to grate and bore, the way it might if delivered by Jim Carrey, Chris Rock, or (worst-case scenario) Tom Arnold. In fact, in an early episode of Jon Favreau's ''Dinner For Five" series, Peter Falk revealed just this kind of exasperation behind the scenes, calling Vaughn a ''hog" for allegedly stepping all over Falk's gravelly lines in ''Made."

Still, here I am chuckling while on-screen the thinking man's John Belushi jams catered foods into his mouth and laps up the sophomoric, homophobic humor penned by ''Wedding Crashers" screenwriters Steve Faber and Bob Fisher.

Under the direction of David Dobkin (''Shanghai Knights"), Vaughn and Wilson come together for the first time as equal-opportunity headliners to play middle-age bachelors out to score free drinks and farklempt women by infiltrating the nuptials of complete strangers. As a pair, they couldn't be less inconspicuous (Vaughn is 6-foot-5; Wilson's famously mangled schnoz would stick out at a cockfight), and their escapades couldn't be more ridiculous. This is a frat-house comedy minus the frat house, so while the slight Wilson is good for some light romantic-comedy-type lifting, it's both remarkable and crucial that his big, goofy buddy is a guy who can get away with overcommitting to every absurd thing he's given to run with, and then some.

In the past, Vaughn might have appeared destined to be the overshadowed, Joey Bishop-level member of the so-called Frat Pack fronted by Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, and the Wilson brothers (Owen and Luke). But on closer examination today, he's arguably the most promising and least one-dimensional actor of the bunch -- a real human with untethered sides that compel you to keep your eye on him, even in the silliest of vehicles.

It helps that he's also NBA height and Victor Mature handsome, with androgynous Betty Boop features and a hint-of-a-cleft chin that make him sexy fodder for gossip page rumors about relationships with everyone from Jennifer Aniston (his costar in the upcoming ''The Break Up") to Janeane Garofalo.

When he first came to widespread attention as Trent, the brash young club hopper who ruled ''Swingers" back in 1996, the Midwestern improv veteran was heralded as the new Dean Martin, with a manic splash of Jerry Lewis built right in. That future cult classic of a movie (directed by Liman; written by leading man Favreau, who first worked with Vaughn in ''Rudy") defined a new kind of vulnerable neurotic cool, and its hilarious ''cocktail nation" chatter led to enduring catch phrases such as ''You're so money," supposedly lifted from Vaughn's own peculiar verbiage.

Steven Spielberg was so impressed that he cast Vaughn prominently in ''The Lost World: Jurassic Park," but then forgot to give the actor anything worth doing, such as feeding Jeff Goldblum to the velociraptors early on in this dog of a sequel. A year later, ''Return to Paradise" offered a meatier role in an exotic adventure film that actually wasn't half bad, but unfortunately for its young stars (including Anne Heche and Joaquin Phoenix), it wasn't all that memorable either.

Too few people saw Favreau's ''Made," a dark-humored disorganized-crime companion piece of sorts to ''Swingers," and too many saw the ''Psycho" remake, which was so shot-for-shot faithful to the original that it put Vaughn in the impossible position of trying to be exactly as creepy as Anthony Perkins. For the record, Vaughn does a more compelling job in another psychotic 1998 film, the uneven, Dobkin-directed ''Clay Pigeons," as a demented cowboy who thoroughly trumps the remade Norman Bates, right down to his nervous laugh.

Like most moviegoers, I was impressed by the visuals in Tarsem Singh's ''The Cell," but I lost interest in the muddled story way before Vaughn's FBI agent character gets psychotherapist Jennifer Lopez to crack open the mind of a serial killer. On the other hand, ''The Prime Gig" was interesting in spite of its predictable path, mostly because it lets Vaughn do the smooth-talking con man turn that he's always seemed genetically built for, even if you didn't know he was raised by parents who worked in sales.

There are almost three dozen feature films on this 35-year-old actor's resume, but the chapter that currently matters most begins with a quiet cameo in 2001's ''Zoolander" (enter the Ben Stiller connection) and a starring role in Todd Phillips's 2003 ensemble romp, ''Old School," featuring Ferrell and Luke Wilson as fellow architects of a latter-day ''Animal House" fraternity.

Vaughn, who reportedly had to convince the makers of ''Old School" that he had the comic chops to play an opinionated family guy named Beanie, followed its blockbuster success with a subtle lead performance in last year's ''Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story," another popular broad comedy that they'll be downloading on college campuses for years.

His Frat Pack status gets him cameos (''Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy") and the occasional mustachioed Jewish coke dealer part (''Starsky & Hutch"), but he was apparently acting on his own when he accepted the racially and critically controversial role of hip-hop slang master Raji, a shady white gangsta wannabe who -- love him or loathe him -- is practically the only thing with a pulse in ''Be Cool."

If you want recent proof that fearless doesn't always mean funny, or wise, Raji is Exhibit A -- a dumbed down Vanilla Ice clone Vaughn got away with embodying only because the rest of ''Be Cool" was such a train wreck.

Still, he did get away with it -- a few even labeled it a brilliant comedic performance -- which in my book crowns him the Teflon Vaughn.

I think the reason he doesn't annoy me is because there always seems to be a brain working behind those mysterious doe eyes, so I wonder not just ''What's this jerk up to?" but ''What might he do next?"

In the words of Raji, the answer invariably comes back: ''Twinkle twinkle, baby. Twinkle twinkle."

I'm not quite sure what that means, but I know it makes me smile.

Janice Page can be reached at jpage22@hotmail.com.