- Network: Lifetime
- Series Premiere Date: Nov 25, 2012
Critic Reviews
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There are so many things in this movie that are just so damned juicy that it is sure is more fun to watch than the exploits of today's orchestrated star pairings.
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While Liz & Dick is wobbly at times, the movie ultimately stands on its own.
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Lohan attacks the part with a relentless, huffing-and-puffing determination that rivets attention.... While Bowler is a flawless Burton, Lohan's single-minded fierceness obliterates him. [3 Dec 2012, p.43]
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Taylor and Burton deserved better, and Lohan should have shed her protective shell and stepped up her game.
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Liz & Dick is not a complete disaster, nor entirely is Lohan.
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It's a story of triumph with a strong vein of tragedy, and in the larger picture, Liz & Dick never captures that scope. Nor, down at the detail level, does the script do neither Lohan or Bowler any favors.
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[Liz & Dick] isn't offensively bad. But it is by no means good.
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But because Lohan seems to be going to a costume party dressed as Taylor while Bowler's giving a performance, the whole thing is an imbalanced mess.
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The film attempts to frame the couple as the harbingers of modern fame, but its ambitions are steamrolled by the impatience of a rushed chronological plot.
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The film's real failure is that it's not terrible enough. Instead it is a respectful and oddly cramped tribute to the legendary love affair between Taylor and Richard Burton that isn't vulgar enough to be entertainingly campy and is too wedded to the myth to riff imaginatively on the couple's gaudy, outsize celebrity.
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You can hate Lifetime movies, and still see that Liz and Dick is exactly what a Lifetime movie is supposed to be, instantly hootable, usually ludicrous, rarely dull.
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Calling this a train wreck makes the movie sound more fascinating than it is.
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Liz & Dick is, simply, a joke.
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In short, she [Lohan] and her film are too awful to watch.
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The film compartmentalizes the public and presumed private lives of Taylor and Burton with little sense of the whole and little sense of who these people really were.
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Bowler and Lohan never approach the kind of magnetism that a movie about Burton and Taylor must conjure in order to be convincing.
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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.
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Those looking for depth will find none. Liz & Dick triumphs, however, as an amusement park for fans of the deeply dreadful.
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Liz & Dick alternates between imbecile fatuity (particularly in its device of intercutting scenes of a black-clad Taylor and Burton musing on their relationship like characters who've wandered in from an East German experimental film) and stupefying literalness.
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Whatever her faults, Ms. Lohan is not the film's biggest problem. That would be the script, which fails to introduce characters or even explain plot developments.
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Lindsay Lohan cannot make a movie this bad by herself. There's an ample assist from the screenwriting, which strings together soap-opera lines ("I won't live without you!" "No more LIES!" "You haven't lost me, I've lost you") into a production you might expect to see Jenna Maroney in on 30 Rock.
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Liz & Dick, Lindsay Lohan's corny "comeback vehicle," is so awful it makes the entire slate of Lifetime guilty-pleasure TV movies look like Masterpiece Theatre.
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Liz and Dick is badly paced, cheap-looking and encrusted with a tinkly, preposterous soundtrack that is designed to make viewers go insane.
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A "Saturday Night Live"-worthy performance by Lindsay Lohan makes this much-anticipated/dreaded Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton biopic even worse than I, at least, had imagined.
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Lohan is woeful as Taylor from start to finish.... 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.
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It's just bad-bad. Specifically, it's retro-bad.
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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.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 9 out of 29
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Mixed: 3 out of 29
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Negative: 17 out of 29
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Dec 2, 2012
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Nov 25, 2012
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Feb 6, 2013