Bruce Willis wears a Hamilton Jazzmaster

By A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth and least-loved film in the series, John McClane has gone fully international. He flies to Moscow to bail out his estranged son Jack, who turns out to be a CIA operative tangled in a plot over a Russian political prisoner and a cache of weapons-grade uranium. The father-and-son framing is the film's one new idea, and Hamilton built its product placement around it.

Both McClanes wear Hamiltons. The studio's own announcement pairs Bruce Willis's McClane in a Hamilton Jazzmaster Viewmatic with Jai Courtney's Jack in a Khaki X-Patrol, the dress watch for the father and the rugged one for the son. The Viewmatic is the plainer piece, a 44mm steel automatic running the ETA 2824-2 with a clean dial and a date at three, the kind of watch that retailed around eight hundred dollars and was built to slip under a shirt cuff. It is the most ordinary watch McClane has worn, which is about the only thing left on this McClane that still fits the original.

Hamilton had been here before. The brand put McClane in a Khaki Aviation ETO in Live Free or Die Hard in 2007, and the Viewmatic carried the relationship into 2013. The watches outlasted the formula. The barefoot cop once trapped in a single building had become a globe-trotting figure who wrecks half of Moscow and walks into Chernobyl, and the modest automatic on his wrist is one of the last things tying him to the man from Nakatomi Plaza.