Get the Messages stream in an SSRS RDL Report

So I'm trying to troubleshoot a particular SSRS RDL Report that literally takes forever to run (mostly because it has a mile of SQL to run).

My question is: Is there any way to retrieve the execution messages from a Dataset? (i.e. 15 row(s) affected).

My reasoning is that executing the SQL directly with static parameters tends to be much faster than using the RDL.

Note I'm not using the pagination thing that tries to keep all of the rows on one page, nor is the ending dataset all that large (a little less than 1500 rows), it's just the processing that's odd.

Ideally I just want the messages stream returned as a string to display as a tooltip.