Jake Gyllenhaal wears a Casio G-Shock

I watch a lot of cop movies, and somewhere along the way I started clocking the wrists. Most of the time it is a watch-department fantasy - a dive watch on a detective who has never been near water. End of Watch is the rare one that gets it right. David Ayer shot the 2012 film as a found-footage ride-along with two LAPD officers working South Central, and the watch on Jake Gyllenhaal's Brian Taylor is exactly what a real patrol cop buys with his own money: a black Casio G-Shock G-7900 in resin, worn next to a paracord bracelet.

In the daylight close-ups the dial reads clearly, and it is pure G-7900: the tide and moon graph curved across the top, four big screws pinning down the bezel, the ILLUMINATOR label on the face, the whole thing rated to 200 metres. The catch is that the tide graph and the moon phase, the watch's entire reason to exist, were built for surfers and divers. On a patrol car in South Central they do precisely nothing.

So why does it belong on his wrist? Everything else. A roughly hundred-dollar lump of resin that shrugs off being slammed into a door frame, a backlight for reading the time in a dark alley at two in the morning, and a coin battery you forget about for two years instead of the solar cell Casio puts in the pricier GW-7900. The toughest thing Brian Taylor owns spends its day keeping tide tables for an ocean he will never patrol. Which is peak G-Shock: you buy the apocalypse-proof watch for the features you will never use.