Iko Uwais wears a Hamilton X-Mach

The Hamilton Khaki X-Mach is a ridiculous watch, and I mean that as a compliment. It was built for pilots, and not just any pilots: you turn the left crown to dial in your altitude and airspeed, and the bezel gives you back the Mach number, your speed as a fraction of the speed of sound. This is a watch for people whose main worry is breaking the sound barrier.

So which movie hero did Hamilton's most flight-obsessed chronograph end up on? A cop who never gets off the ground. Iko Uwais plays Rama in The Raid: Redemption, the rookie on an elite squad that raids a Jakarta high-rise run by a drug lord, gets made by a kid on lookout, and then spends the rest of Gareth Evans's 2011 action landmark fighting up the building floor by floor. No planes, no sky, just a stairwell, his fists, and a few hundred men who want him dead.

I got the ID from Worn & Wound's history of Hamilton on screen, which puts it plainly: "rookie cop Rama sports a Hamilton X-Mach chronograph." It's a black-dialed slab with an altimeter-styled bezel and stitching meant to echo an old flight jacket, aviation cosplay on a man fighting for his life in a concrete tower. Somehow that's perfect: the most over-engineered pilot's watch Hamilton ever made, on the one character with absolutely nowhere to fly.