REVIEWERS laughed patronisingly at the press screening of The Longest Ride when a character speaks of “art.” So, obviously, this film is for cinema goers, not critics.

Ironically, though, it makes no pretence at being art. It’s from a novel by bestselling US writer Nicholas Sparks who has struck gold celebrating schmaltz rather than gritty realism.

Craig Bolotin’s screenplay interweaves two saccharine story lines — the contemporary romance of hunky bull rider Luke Collins (Scott Eastwood) and college girl Sophia Dank (Britt Robertson) and the decades-long love of American-Jew Young Ira (Jack Huston) and Austrian-Jewish immigrant Young Ruth (Dona Chaplin).

The two stories collide when Collins rescues the son of the elderly Ira Levin (Alan Alda) from a car wreck, unleashing soggy, sugar-saturated sentiment before the inevitable happy ending.

To their credit, the key performers act with commendably straight faces. Eastwood is suitably hunky, Robertson is all-American cute and Alda scores in his hospital bed-bound role.

It’s certainly not art but warm-hearted mush in the best and cliched Woman’s Weekly romantic novelette tradition.

It would be too easy, given the genuinely exciting adrenaline-fuelled bull-riding sequences, to call it a load of bull. But since one storyline involves “art,” perhaps a load of Pollocks will suffice.