There's something about Jennifer

How has a brilliant comic actress managed to star in so many unfunny romcoms? As another Jennifer Aniston film gets panned, Ben Walsh leaps to her defence

Jennifer Aniston stars as Elinor Dashwood in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility ... no, of course she doesn't. Aniston doesn't do period drama. She is a defiantly modern, all-American actress; a tabloid favourite; one of the faces for L'Oréal and ... wait for it ... the woman who lost Brad Pitt to Angelina Jolie.

And it doesn't matter one jot how much worthy UN work Jolie does, most of us are still stubbornly Team Aniston. Why? Because she's so ordinary, that's why. So very ordinary and accessible with her engaging, genial comments like "I couldn't have found a better man than Brad. He still opens doors for me and brings me flowers. He's the sweetest goofball on the planet". Ouch. That has to hurt now.

The sleek, perma-tanned 40-year-old from Sherman Oaks, California, started out so deliciously perky, all glossy hair and clean teeth, as Rachel in the defiantly upbeat sitcom Friends, but Jennifer Aniston's face appears to become progressively more downcast in every film she appears in. She's morphing into a sort of female Buster Keaton. Her smile is growing fainter and her film choices – or the parts she is being offered – are getting steadily shoddier.

The Independent's film critic, Anthony Quinn, described her latest one-star film, the unfortunately titled Love Happens, starring Aaron Eckhart, where Aniston plays an archery champion turned florist, as a "cry-baby romantic drama" in which "Aniston just about passes muster". The Times went further, saying, "The formula they've come up with is to remove all the comedy, which is a bold choice." The Scotsman go further still, "Love Happens ... there's just not much evidence of it in this dreary romantic drama."

Previous Aniston films have been described as follows: "From the start it misfires on all cylinders" (The Observer on Rumour Has It); "There is something wildly odd about a film that measures human happiness with the whims of a dog (The Times on Marley & Me); and "A heavy-handed and charmless psychological thriller" (The Guardian on Derailed).