Bruce Willis wears a Breitling Chronomat

John McClane has been suspended from the NYPD and is more or less a full-blown alcoholic when Simon blows up the Bonwit Teller department store and tells the police he wants McClane back on the street. The film is John McTiernan's Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995). Bruce Willis plays McClane. The watch on his wrist is a Breitling Chronomat.

Breitling launched the Chronomat in 1984 to mark the brand's hundredth anniversary, and they built the watch from a chronograph they'd designed the year before for a specific customer: the Frecce Tricolori, the Italian Air Force's aerial demonstration squadron. The Frecce Tricolori had asked Breitling for a chronograph that could survive the cockpit and look reasonable at dinner. The crystal kept getting cracked when pilots opened the canopy. Breitling's answer was to recess the crystal in the bezel and protect it with four small raised tabs at the quarter-hour marks. The tabs were interchangeable: 15-minute markers for flight count-up, 45-minute markers for regatta count-down. The line was Breitling's bet that mechanical chronographs still belonged in the era of quartz.

A watch built around the problem of jet canopies, on the wrist of a New York detective who spends the film in subway tunnels and the aqueduct system, getting handed riddles by Hans Gruber's brother.