Angela Bassett wears a Cartier Panthère

For most of Olympus Has Fallen, Angela Bassett runs the crisis from a chair. She plays Lynne Jacobs, Director of the Secret Service, working the federal response from a Pentagon briefing room after a North Korean strike team seizes the White House and takes the president hostage. Jacobs is the official who keeps vouching for Mike Banning, the agent fighting alone inside the building, long after the rest of the room has given him up for dead.

On her wrist is a Cartier Panthère de Cartier in steel: a square case, Roman numerals, blue sword-shaped hands, and the flat brick-link bracelet that gave the watch its name, links that lie flush against the wrist like a cat. Cartier introduced the Panthère in 1983 as a women's luxury piece, and through the decade it became a status object, the watch of people who had arrived. It reads as exactly the watch a Director brings to a briefing.

Banning, down inside the building, wears a Casio G-Shock, a tool bolted to a wrist for the worst day of a man's life. Jacobs wears jewelry. The film sorts its competence along that line without ever naming it: the man in the rubber dive watch does the killing, and the woman in the Cartier is the one voice in the command room that turns out, every time, to be right.