Chris Pine wears a Casio F-91W

In a Berlin storm drain, hiding with the one teammate he pulled out of a shootout that killed the rest of the team, James Harper checks a small digital watch, a gloved finger on the pusher and the stopwatch zeroed at 00.00. The case is flat rectangular resin with a blue-trimmed display: the shape of a Casio F-91W. Watch-ID and Spotern both log it as one, the brand name is never readable in the frame, and no watch publication covered the film.

It is the second of two watches the film puts on Harper's wrist. His main watch is a round black Garmin Instinct; the Casio appears in the underground escape. IEEE Spectrum, which inducted the F-91W into its Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame, prices it around ten dollars and estimates Casio still makes roughly three million a year, some ninety million units since 1989, with a design that has never changed and a battery that runs about seven years. The same entry notes it is typically the first or second best-selling watch on Amazon, and that a pre-presidential Barack Obama wore one.

Harper is a Sergeant First Class, a decorated Green Beret involuntarily discharged for using illegal steroids to treat a debilitating knee injury, stripped of his military benefits and facing financial ruin; the private contract he takes comes with a fifty-thousand-dollar advance. The Berlin job collapses into the storm drain where the Casio appears. The Contractor was Tarik Saleh's English-language debut, and the identification of Harper's second watch still rests on its silhouette and the aggregators that spotted it.