Arnold Schwarzenegger wears a MTM Cobra 47

Arnold Schwarzenegger is a watch guy. For years he has been associated with the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore, and the company has made limited editions in his name. So it is worth noticing what he is not wearing in Sabotage.

David Ayer's 2014 film is the bleakest thing Schwarzenegger has ever done. He plays Breacher Wharton, the leader of a DEA tactical unit that skims ten million dollars from a cartel safe house and then begins to die, one grisly killing at a time. Breacher carries his own buried horror. The cartel kidnapped his wife and son and tortured them to death on video, footage he watches alone, and he has been a man with nothing left to lose ever since.

The watch on his wrist is an MTM Cobra 47, and you can see it clearly in the shootouts, a chunky grey titanium chronograph with a black dial and a single red second hand, strapped over his tactical gloves. MTM is a small Los Angeles company that builds tactical watches for soldiers and police, and it lists this appearance on its own media page, so the placement is real. What matters on screen is that the watch reads as anonymous government kit. Nobody mistakes Breacher for a man who would wear his Royal Oak to a gunfight.

It is a quiet, correct piece of costuming. The Cobra 47 is titanium and quartz and built to be beaten on, the opposite of a flex. Putting the plainest possible watch on the actor most identified with an expensive one tells you who Breacher is without a line of dialogue.