The ‘Liz & Dick’ Reviews Are In

Lindsay Lohan’s Liz & Dick premiered on Lifetime last night so how was it and how did it do? Well, according to everyone, it was clearly awful but that wasn’t a big revelation. What did the critics have to say? Here are excerpts from a few of the reviews floating out there.

Lohan will probably make the case, somewhere down the line, that her flat, vacant line readings were a campy attempt to distance herself from the film’s many bad lines. One of the worst comes when Taylor’s mother notes her tendency to get married a lot.

Mom: “Not that I’m counting, but if I’m not mistaken you’ve just ended, what, you’re fourth marriage?”

Liz: “Who’s counting?” Tim Molly, Reuters

Whoever wrote that line probably patted himself on the back for that one. He probably even did the finger gun and wink in the mirror to himself.

The film, starring Lindsay Lohan and Grant Bowler and airing Sunday night, is terrible. It could have been terrible in a fun way, but is, alas, terrible in the other way: It’s so terrible, you’ll need to ice your face when it’s over to ease the pain of wincing for two hours. David Wiegand, SF Gate

Tell us how you really feel, David.

Liz & Dick is a very peculiar TV movie indeed. The opening seconds flash a ”based on a true story” message across the screen. But the ”story” — that is, the life that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton shared mostly during the 1960s, after meeting while making Cleopatra (1963) — was much richer in reality than it is in this dinky, tin-eared production. Instead, the primary interest in watching Liz & Dick is to behold Lindsay Lohan trying, with varying, wobbly degrees of effort, to make her own career comeback. Ken Tucker, EW

In best gravelly Lindsay voice. “Hata!”

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. Tom Gliatto, PEOPLE

Always leave it up to PEOPLE to put a positive spin on things.

But Lohan, despite all her career troubles, is still a star. And one star playing another makes for a fascinating performance, if not a great or even good one. She has thrown herself into an impossible project, in a grand gamble to reestablish herself, and she attacks the part with a relentless, huffing-and-puffing determination that throws any acting technique under the bus and yet still rivets attention.

By the way, you got some brown on your nose.

…None of which happens, in any way, shape or form, during Lifetime’s television event “Liz & Dick,” a wildly graceless biopic that careens through the decades-long relationship between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton with more petulance than passion, knocking down gin bottles and rumpling silk sheets for no better reason than that’s what it says to do in the script. Mary McNamara, LAT

Hey, don’t blame Lindsay. She’s just going with what she knows. Which, apparently, isn’t much.

Actually, these reviews are surprising. We all thought this was going to be her big career comeback. Haha, just kidding. No, this pretty much went as expected. You could have written a review before they even finished filming and it wouldn’t have been too far off.