There is no doubt that Christopher Nolan knows how to put a cast together, and the majority of his decisions in the Dark Knight trilogy were very shrewd. Were it not for the questionable decisions behind Katie Holmes, Juno Temple and Sarah Jayne Dunn (all of whom were either replaced or all but edited out), and behind Matthew Modine, who was wooden, his ledger would have been redless. Joel Schumacher's decisions were less nailed on: Alicia Silverstone didn't so much deliver lines as chew them long after they'd left her face, Chris O'Donnell was too wet behind the ears, and all of the villains (apart from Jim Carrey's Riddler) could and should have been cast better, not to mention executed better. George Clooney meanwhile was hamstrung badly by a terrible script and by association with easily the worst Batman film of all, and had he been under the guidance of a better director and with a better script behind him he might have been far, far better as both Batman and Bruce Wayne. But Tim Burton's casting team didn't put a single foot wrong in the major choices: Michael Keaton, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jack Nicholson, Danny DeVito, Christopher Walken and Michael Gough are all perfectly cast, and put in career-high or near-career-high performances. And then in the wider cast, there are very few if any examples of actors badly placed or wrongly used, which is impressive given the size of the casts.
