Time is at an absolute premium during the Cannes Film Festival, and 60 to 90 minutes is a sizable block of that stuff. But I must attend! I must diligently support and especially (if necessary) defend this presumably exceptional film from the bad guys.

Am I understanding this correctly? And just under one-quarter of all viewers are primarily or entirely watching broadcast. What is a fair term to describe this segment of the populace? Hayseeds?

Full respect and earnest affection for the greatest actress of the late 20th Century (not to mention her stellar performances in The Devil Wears Prada, The Iron Lady and The Post), although I’ve never forgotten this 2015 Telluride discussion.

HE answer: Initially tolerable…irritating and certainly pumped up and obviously spittle and a waste of time, but not felonious. But it began to feel more and more bruising.

I really hate everything about this kind of bullshit megaplex action film…the kind that’s been par for the course for at least a quarter-century if not longer, perhaps going as far back as 48 HRS. and Lethal Weapon.

Except those films are almost Alvin Sargent-level compared to The Fall Guy…I really hate where this genre has gone, the kind of film that directors like David Leitch, a blend of amiable, low-key attitude and truly Satanic intent, have made into a form of surface-skimming pornography.

For me The Fall Guy felt gauche and bludgeoning and generally sociopathic…a cartoonishly violent, motor-mouthed mescaline movie…characters of a shallow or grating or despicable stripe…venal, wafer-thin, smirky, japey, goofball, overbearing and exhausting, like the film itself…for the most part repulsive and certainly draining.

Ryan Gosling is middle-aged stunt veteran Colt Seavers, a bruised and tousle-haired poseur…a Hollow Man whom T.S. Eliot would recognize instantly…a performance that belongs in the same trash bin as his empty Coke bottle zone-outs in Only God Forgives and The Gray Man…the guy I loved or at least related to in Drive, The Big Short and La–La Land has been terminated.

Emily Blunt’s performance as Bony Maronie…sorry, Colt’s ex and first-time director Jody Moreno (the film-within-the-film is a ComicCon nightmare called Metalstorm) is equally empty and narcotizing.

Aaron Taylor Johnson’s tousle-haired bad-guy movie star is nothing…a mosquito.

The most annoying and despicable character, an aggressively phony exec producer of Metalstorm called Gail Meyer, is played by Ted Lasso veteran Hannah Waddingham…black hair dye, screeching chalk.

Story-wise The Fall Guy contains all the real-world grit and gravitas of a Scream movie…Scream with wild-ass stunts.

Leitch orchestrates and choreographs with adrenalized efficiency as far as it goes, but Drew Pearce’s screenplay has less real-world intrigue than a Road Runner cartoon and is oppressively untethered to any semblance of human behavior…the man should be hunted down, arrested and sentenced to ten years on Devil’s Island with Papillon and Alfred Dreyfuss.

I laughed at one bit — when Colt’s hotel room swipe card doesn’t work twice.

…starts at 7 pm this evening, and God help me. Two hours of guaranteed David Leitch-ian misery. Plus I’ll be bummed out for the rest of the evening.

We all understand that a significant percentage of woke Cannes critics may be looking to slag the first chapter of Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga (Warner Bros., 6.28) when the three–hour film plays later this month on the Côte d’Azur.

This is because Costner’s 19th Century narrative focuses upon (and reportedly gives a fair shake to) the perspective of fair-skinned, covered-wagon settlers, and consequently may not be perceived as sufficiently supportive of Native Americans, at least from a most-old-time-whiteys-were-evil-racists, Lily Gladstone-esque perspective.

HE 100% guarantees that a sizable portion of wokester Branch Davidians have already decided to pan Costner’s film, sight unseen. To balance this out, HE has decided sight unseen and if at all possible to bend over backwards in order to…well, give the film as much of a fair shake as I can within the boundaries of honesty and candor.

…but at the same time surrounded by so much crap. Which is often par for the course, I realize. If a big-name actor manages to bat between .250 and .333, he/she is doing rather well.

When I think of truly gold-standard Michael Caine films, maybe 10 or 12 come to mind…Get Carter, Sleuth, Alfie, A Shock to the System, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Quiet American, Mona Lisa, Children of Men, Zulu, Youth, Harry Brown, Educating Rita, The Man Who Would Be King, Funeral in Berlin, The Ipcress File…what is that, 15?

Caine himself (or an assistant) posted this photo of his DVD and Bluray highlights. Give them credit for humorously including The Swarm (“A bee movie,” Caine once remarked) and Jaws 4.

In short, the festival hasn’t even begun but from an ideological, social-political perspective the fix is already in, more or less. Greta Gerwig + Lily Gladstone + Hirokazu Kore-Eda (Monster, Broker, Shoplifters) will presumably fill the role of the jury’s urgent humanist crusaders…the Batman + Robin + Commissioner Gordon social-inequity problem solvers…do the right thing, ”holy fruit salad!”, etc.

The only jurors I feel a strong cinematic kinship with are J.A. Bayona (The Orphanage, Society of the Snow) and Nadine Labaki (Capernaum). With much chagrin HE admits to never having seen Omar Sy’s standout performance in The Untouchables…my bad. Ebru Ceylan is the embedded screenwriting collaborator of her husband, director Nuri-Bilge Ceylan (Winter Sleep, About Dry Grasses).