Liz and Dick

Well, it is the season for turkeys. This one’s big enough to handle the feeding of the 5,000, but any resemblance to miracles ends there. For, this also being the season of goodwill, you want to be charitable and hope that this peculiar biopic of the warring relationship between Hollywood’s brightest stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, as played by Lindsay Lohan and Grant Bowler, will be better than it sounds.

Sadly, it’s not. Constructed as part documentary, part biopic, the action cuts back and forth between the couple in a studio addressing the audience from their vantage point of the 1980s and extensive scenes from their stormy past, beginning with their meeting on the set of ‘Cleopatra’ and continuing through the fights, the drinking, the on-set rows, the break-ups and the reconciliations.

At the heart of it, Lohan – seemingly channelling a more modern celeb as a dead ringer for Nigella Lawson – clearly doesn’t cut it, but even more problematic is the fact that the passion, pathos, spirit, talent and troubles that characterised and drove each of these extraordinarily creative people just isn’t here, making for a turgid, tawdry 90 minutes. Spend it watching ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ instead.