Eddie Murphy wears an IWC Aquatimer

Slide is the kind of character Eddie Murphy used to play in his sleep, a fast-talking petty criminal recruited for a job several rungs above his pay grade. In Brett Ratner's 2011 caper Tower Heist, Ben Stiller plays the manager of a Manhattan luxury tower whose staff pension fund is wiped out by a Bernie Madoff figure living in the penthouse, played by Alan Alda. The crew Stiller assembles to rob him is made up of doormen and bellhops, and Slide is the only one with an actual criminal record, though his record runs more to shoplifting than to grand larceny. He is the muscle in theory and the comic relief in practice.

The watch is easy to miss until the safe-cracking scene. Murphy crouches at a small floor safe with a headset pressed to his ear and a device in his hand, and his wrist swings fully into frame: a steel diver's chronograph on a dark rubber strap, black dial, a silver subdial, and a flash of yellow on the bezel and the minute hand. It is an IWC Aquatimer Chronograph, reference IW376701, the black-and-yellow variant of IWC's dive line, a 44mm stainless case with a unidirectional bezel whose first fifteen minutes glow yellow, day and date at three, and IWC's caliber 79320 automatic chronograph inside, rated to roughly 120 meters. This generation of the Aquatimer arrived in 2009, when IWC redrew the line around a bolder, more legible dive look and tied several editions to the Charles Darwin Foundation and the Galapagos; the IW376701 is the workaday steel-and-rubber sibling in that family, its yellow lume zone reading as the colorway even when the dial text never resolves on camera.

There is a quiet joke in the casting of the watch. A broke ex-con cracking a safe is wearing a five-to-six-thousand-dollar Swiss dive chronograph, a wrist that out-earns its owner's rap sheet, and the film never pauses to explain it. Eddie Murphy is a serious watch wearer off camera, with Rolex and Cartier in his real collection, which makes the Aquatimer feel less like a throwaway prop than a deliberate choice for a man who wants to look like he has already arrived. Slide wants to be the kind of man who wears an IWC. He is not that man yet.