Dolph Lundgren wears a Panerai Luminor

There is a moment in Expend4bles when Gunner Jensen, the team's sniper, admits he can no longer see straight. Damn spots, he calls them, floaters drifting across his line of fire. Dolph Lundgren plays him as the film's comic ballast, six months sober and reading a paperback called Sober Living: A Guide to Staying Dry between firefights. It is an odd thing to build an action hero around, a marksman whose eyes are going and a drinker working to stay clear.

The Panerai Luminor on his wrist fits both halves of that better than it has any right to. Panerai built the Luminor's ancestor in the 1940s for the frogmen of the Italian Navy, divers who needed a dial they could read in black water, so the watch was engineered around one idea: legibility when nothing else is legible. Fat lume, a wide sandwich dial, a crown-guard bridge clamped over the winding crown to keep the sea out. On a man fighting to hold both his aim and his sobriety in focus, a watch designed to be read in the dark is the right kind of joke. Scott Waugh directed; Lundgren, in his mid-sixties and a trained chemical engineer long before he ever held a prop rifle, still plays the lug with more wit than the role asks for.