Although Lindsay Lohan has been busy career-wise this year – finally- it’s her role as Elizabeth Taylor in the biopic Liz & Dick that everyone’s been waiting for to come round. The television feature finally aired on US network Lifetime over the weekend, but if it was the big comeback after years of legal trouble that the actress hoped for, then she’ll be pretty disappointed with the response to it.

The press gave the film a critical mauling; Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were among the most outrageous Hollywood actors of their era, and though Lohan has certainly had her fair share of off-screen infamy, she didn’t come close to portraying Taylor’s extravagance. “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” mercilessly wrote the TV Guide. The Hollywood Reporter meanwhile wrote “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.”

With the Twitter universe getting its first glimpse of Liz & Dick last night too, appraisals didn’t really improve. “If you want to see something better than Liz& Dick, go to YouTube and search for ‘explosive diarrhea’” said one disgruntled Tweeter, whilst another added “I cannot take LaLohan seriously as Elizabeth Taylor... its like Paris Hilton playing Marilyn Monroe”.