Liz & Dick: That Sure-To-Be-Craptastic Lifetime Movie Airs TONIGHT!!!!

It seemed as though Elizabeth Taylor had just drawn her last breath when Lifetime announced they'd be doing a TV movie based on her relationship--and marriages--to Richard Burton. It sounded kinda good, given that Taylor was such an icon for so many decades. But then Lifetime stepped in it when they announced that jewel thief, kidnapper, drug addict, alcohol, party girl, car crashing, vah-jay-jay baring, can't pay her hotel bills, bum, Lindsay Lohan would be playing Dame Elizabeth.

And that movie--Liz & Dick--airs tonight, and the reviews are in:

• Tim Goodman, of The Hollywood Reporter says "don't miss Liz & Dick," but only because it "is spectacularly bad" and a "classic of unintentional hilarity." Goodman says the star is "woeful as Taylor from start to finish.....At one point, Lohan has to shout, 'I won’t live without you!' and then run down a hall. It’s like a high school play....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."
• Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times says, “There are moments in Liz & Dick when Lindsay Lohan looks a lot like Elizabeth Taylor. There are others in which she looks like Elizabeth Taylor doing a Saturday Night Live impersonation of Lindsay Lohan." But Stanley gives Lohan some props, I guess, saying Lindsay isn't "ridiculous" in the role, but that "she is oddly passive, sleepwalking through scenes that call for passion and caprice."

There's a headline: Lindsay Lohan ISN'T Ridiculous in Liz & Dick!

• Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly's gave the film a C- rating and describing it variously as "very peculiar," "dinky" and "tin-eared." About the star's performance, Tucker says that a "wall goes up between the actress and us. Is it years of ducking tabloid photographers that have frozen her face into a blank stare?" Instead of the real Taylor's "high-register, girlish" voice, Tucker says Lohan provides line readings in "the raspy rattle familiar to anyone who has seen [her] on TMZ....No effort seems to have gone into Lohan's preparation other than tinting her eyes Liz-violet."
• Willa Paskin, from Salon, says "there is nothing 'unintentional'" about the hilarious awfulness of the movie, pointing out that by its very "Lifetime movie" nature, the film is meant to be a subpar slice of overcooked melodrama. Paskin says the framing device in which the two stars sit in director's chairs talking directly to the camera actually serves Lohan well: "The destruction Lohan has wreaked on her own voice -- it’s the come-hither, smoky growl of an equally jaded, but much older woman -- works perfectly here. And with no blocking or costumes or screeching to worry about, she’s almost decent." 

Another headline: Lindsay Lohan Is "Almost Decent" In Liz & Dick!

• Maureen Ryan of Huffpost offers up a list of things a Taylor-Burton biopic should do: "1. It should establish Burton and Taylor as charismatic, complex people.  2. It should make the electricity of their relationship apparent.  3. It should be a treat for the eyes." Needless to say, Liz & Dick " does absolutely none of these things....Exploitation really is the name of the game here," Ryan writes, noting that "the whole point of casting Lohan was to draft off her status as a formerly promising actress who some time ago became a tabloid fodder thanks to her career-destroying antics." The movie is "badly paced, cheap-looking and encrusted with a tinkly, preposterous soundtrack that is designed to make viewers go insane."

And yet another headline: Watching Liz & Dick Causes Insanity!!

• Ryan also offers rules for a drinking game: "Take a drink every time you think a set looks cheesy; take a drink every time you think of better casting for the leads; take a drink every time you think you've spotted Bowler wondering if his check cleared; take a drink every time you spot Creed from The Office, because WTF?"
• Matt Roush of TV Guide asks that age old question, "What unbecomes a legend most?" before nominating Liz & Dick for the "TV Turkey Hall of Fame." It's "an epic of stunningly cynical and pathetic miscasting, a TV movie so laughably inept it doesn't deserve to be on a first-name basis with anything resembling humanity."
• But it's not all bad news for Original Recipe Lohan™; Linda Stasi of that bastion of intellectual journalism, the New York Post, gives the movie three stars out of four, saying Lohan "is so often believable you might think you're seeing the real thing....There are so many things in this movie that are just so damned juicy," Stasi notes," that it is sure is [sic] more fun to watch than the exploits of today's orchestrated star pairings."
• Brian Lowry, from Variety, says the movie has "secret weapon" in Grant Bowler, who "classes up the movie in much the way Burton's classically trained Shakespearean actor played off Taylor's lifelong movie star." The famous couple "engage in epic fights, spend money like drunken sailors, take refuge from the prying press by living on a yacht, and struggle through Burton's bouts of melancholy over failing to win Oscars." Lowry ends up saying that the movie may be "wobbly" at points, but that it "ultimately stands on its own."

Which the audience won't be able to do if they play any sort of drinking game while watching. I, of course, will struggle to remain sober through the insanity that is Liz & Dick!

It premieres on Lifetime tonight at 9 p.m.

Be there, or not. Meh.

via THR