Robert Downey, Jr., America's scamp, has tasted what the other guys are selling and found it lacking. Downey, whose star vehicle Iron Man got the summer movie season of 2008 off to a bang back when it opened several hundred years ago, has given an interview to moviehole.com in which he found it impossible to discourse on what made his movie so special, and what will make its sequel (which reunites him with director Jon Favreau and Tropic Thunder co-writer Justin Theroux, who's working on the script) so special, without talking about what makes it different from The Dark Knight. Whereas Iron Man is "a very simple movie", Downey says of the Batman blockbuster, "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 [Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan's] The Prestige but didn't understand The Dark Knight. 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 f--king smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie.' You know what? F-ck DC comics. That's all I have to say and that's where I'm really coming from."

The first thing to be said about this is that if anyone finds that their college education helps them to better understand why Jim Gordon didn't dispatch a SWAT team to surround that boat that the Joker was aboard after Eric Roberts tipped him off, then that lucky viewer must have gone to a hell of a school. (Personally, my college education wasn't even enough to keep me from pissing away eleven dollars on a ticket to Vicky Cristina Barcelona.) Of course, Downey's harsh words for DC Comics will set off little tremors in the minds of comics geeks who remember bitter wars of words on the playground between self-styled DC fanboys and Marvel zombies. However much he means it, it's fun when these companies' star employees pretend to be infected with the virus, as anyone who ever saw Alan Moore take custody of the microphone at a comics convention in the 1980s, before he adopted a "plague on both their houses" attitude. It's kind of like professional wrestling without the folding chairs. Downey himself seems to get a giggle out of his bad-boy act. "You know, you're never too old to burn your bridges because I believe I have offended everyone," he said. "I think I've got a couple more.

On the subject of his other summer hit, Tropic Thunder, Downey has one thing he wants to make very clear: he is not Kirk Lazarus, the looney, Oscar-festooned Method actor he plays, who vows to remain in character until he's recorded the picture's DVD commentary. Speaking of the character, Downey says that "I think his fatal flaw is pretty much any and everyone's who's in entertainment, which is, on a certain level: 'Oh if they believe they're a fraud and that's creating this neurotic state,' when the truth is, you are a fraud because you've gone too far into buying into your own hype and now you're, literally crazy. I think Kirk Lazarus is nuts." Discussing his decision to make Kirk Australian, Downey adds, "I just think that the Australian phenomenon reminds me more of American as with the British invasion from the '60s. But when I was thinking about Kirk Lazarus I was thinking about Colin Farrell, about Daniel Day Lewis and about Russell Crowe and whoever was the most effective tool for whatever my thing was, I would use." When it was pointed out to him that a lot of viewers sure do see a lot of Crowe in there, Downey permitted himself a smile. "Now do you think he would see it as the highest form of flattery or do you think that he would be less than pleased?"