Review Roundup: Lindsay Lohan Stars in Lifetime's LIZ & DICK

Lifetime's original movie LIZ & DICK, which chronicles the rocky relationship of legendary stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, premiered on the cable network last night, Sunday, November 25th. Directed by Lloyd Kramer, the film stars Lindsay Lohan as Taylor and Grant Bowler as Burton. The script was written by Christopher Monger and produced by Larry A. Thompson.

Let's see what the critics had to say:

Tim Goodman, The Hollywood Reporter: Lohan is woeful as Taylor from start to finish. But, whatever you do, don’t miss Liz & Dick. It’s an instant classic of unintentional hilarity. Drinking games were made for movies like this. And the best part is that it gets worse as it goes on, so in the right company with the right beverages, Liz & Dick could be unbearably hilarious toward the tail end of the 90-minute running time. By the time Lohan is playing mid-’80s Taylor and it looks like a lost Saturday Night Live skit, your body may be cramped by convulsions.

Maureen Ryan, The Huffington Post: 'Liz and Dick' is badly paced, cheap-looking and encrusted with a tinkly, preposterous soundtrack that is designed to make viewers go insane. It's also littered with exposition-heavy segments in which Liz and Dick reminisce about their past, perhaps from beyond the grave. In those segments, they wear matching black ensembles and essentially narrate their own lives, much to their own amusement. In doing so, they make these rich and eventful lives sound a lot less interesting than they actually were.

David Wiegand, The San Francisco Chronicle: From a distance, and perhaps more so when she was younger and her notorious partying hadn't started to show on her face, Lohan bears a certain resemblance to Taylor. But it's not enough by half to make her credible here. For one thing, virtually no attempt has been made to reflect Taylor's physicality. Unlike Lohan, she had hips. And at certain times during the period the film covers, she had a lot more than that. The recreated scene from 'Virginia Woolf' is absurd: It's as though Burton is trading barbs with a 14-year-old boy in drag.

Tom Gliatto, People.com: Lohan, 26, suggests this Taylor only in a few carefully lit close-ups: She's gorgeous, full-faced, worn. As the still-later Taylor, the perfume merchandiser with the spiked plumes of hair, she looks more like Joan Collins stapled in half. She captures none of Taylor's generously displayed voluptuousness, none of the sloppy good humor that endeared her to the public – not even that glass-scratching voice.

Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly: Liz & Dick was a peculiar, drab, damp little TV-movie indeed, wasn’t it? The opening seconds flashed a “based on a true story” message across the screen. But the “story” – that is, the life that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton shared, chronicled here primarily during the 1960s, after meeting during the making of Cleopatra (1963) – was so much richer in reality than it was in this dinky, tin-eared production. Instead, the primary interest in watching Liz & Dick was to behold Lindsay Lohan trying, with varying, wobbly degrees of effort, to make her own career comeback.

Tim Molloy, Reuters: It's impossible to feel any emotional connection with the characters, because, as portrayed here, they're self-centered asses. It doesn't help that the dialogue is awful, and that many scenes are less than 30 seconds long, which doesn't allow us into the character's heads. The scenes are strung together by sub-sitcom transitional music that at least tips us off to the disposability of the entire movie.

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