 Following the release of Erin Brockovich, Eckhart co-starred with Renée Zellweger in LaBute's Nurse Betty (2000). He next appeared in Sean Penn's mystery feature The Pledge (2001), in which he played a young detective partnered with a veteran detective, played by Jack Nicholson. The movie received generally favorable reviews, but it did not fare particularly well at the box office. The following year, he collaborated with LaBute in a film adaptation of the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Possession (2002). In 2003, Eckhart co-starred with Hilary Swank in The Core, a film about a geophysicist who tries to detonate a nuclear device in order to save the world from destruction. The film was critically and financially unsuccessful. Also in 2003, he appeared in The Missing, in which he played Cate Blanchett's lover, and in the action-thriller Paycheck opposite Ben Affleck. Paycheck, based on a short story by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, garnered generally negative reception. Film critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two stars (out of four), saying that he "enjoyed the movie" but felt that it "exploits [Dick's story] for its action and plot potential, but never really develops it."
