Super-sarcastic ... Robert Downey Jr in Iron Man. Is the actor just fooling around with his bafflement at The Dark Knight?
Given his sarcastic nature, it seems unlikely that Robert Downey Jr's comments about The Dark Knight in a new interview with Moviehole.net are anything but tongue-in-cheek. Still, the idea of the actor sitting in the cinema watching with incredulous rage the film that stole the box office thunder of his most successful film of all time had us amused.
"My whole thing is that I saw The Dark Knight. I feel like I'm dumb because I feel like I don't get how many things that are so smart," says Downey Jr in the piece, which otherwise centres mainly on his new film, the Ben Stiller comedy Tropic Thunder. "It's like a Ferrari engine of storytelling and script writing and I'm like, 'That's not my idea of what I want to see in a movie.'
"I loved The Prestige but didn't understand The Dark Knight," he continues. "Didn't get it, still can't tell you what happened in the movie, what happened to the character and in the end they need him to be a bad guy. I'm like, 'I get it. This is so high brow and so fucking smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie.' You know what? Fuck DC comics. That's all I have to say and that's where I'm really coming from."
The Dark Knight has already left Iron Man's total US box office so far, $316m, way behind it, so perhaps Downey Jr really is miffed after losing his crown as headliner of the summer's most successful superhero blockbuster. If that is the case, Vietnam war movie spoof Tropic Thunder had better knock Christopher Nolan's caped crusader off the US No 1 spot when it opens this weekend, or its star will have a whole new cache of ammunition to fuel his ire.
