James McAvoy wears a Casio A168W-1

The first clear look at Wesley Gibson's watch comes on his nightstand, lying among the wreckage of his life: a pill bottle of Ativan made out to GIBSON, W, a worn paperback of What to Say When You Talk to Your Self, and the cheap steel watch beside them. Timur Bekmambetov's 2008 Wanted casts James McAvoy as the most put-upon man in his office - a cubicle account manager with panic attacks, a girlfriend who's cheating on him, and a boss who berates him daily - before he's pulled into a hidden fraternity of assassins. The watch riding through all of it is about the cheapest thing a leading man could wear: a square steel Casio digital.

I can read it right off the dial. CASIO sits in the top-left corner, WATER RESIST below the screen, and the layout is pure A168 - day and seconds across the top, big hours and minutes underneath, all in a polished steel case on a matching steel bracelet. The screen-used watch later turned up at a Propstore sale, catalogued as a Casio with a metal case, a stainless steel bracelet, and a working illuminator button. It's the A168, Casio's entry-level steel digital, the kind that's cost about twenty dollars for decades.

The easy reading is that the cheap Casio is Wesley's old life, the thing he sheds the moment he becomes a killer. The film never does that. The same watch is still on his wrist deep into the action, clearest while he hangs off the side of a moving train carriage halfway through. And it isn't even the only Casio in the picture. The Exterminator, the Fraternity's bomb man played by Konstantin Khabensky, has one too: in the recovery-room scene he explains baiting rats with peanut butter and triggering them with the detonator on his watch, a blue-strapped Casio with a little white block and two wires rigged up as a charge. One keeps time for a frightened man, one sets off a bomb, both came out of the same catalogue.