Jamie Foxx wears an IWC Aquatimer

Watch Ricardo Tubbs closely through Miami Vice and you notice he changes watches with the light. Michael Mann's 2006 film, drawn from the 1980s series he created, casts Jamie Foxx as a Miami detective working deep undercover in the cocaine trade, and Mann ran the production's wrists through IWC. In the daylight scenes, the meetings and the buys, Tubbs wears an IWC Portuguese chronograph. After dark, when the work moves to fast boats and open water, he switches to the watch catalogued here: an IWC Aquatimer Split Minute Chronograph. Mann liked the pairing enough that IWC made a fifty-piece Portuguese with a Miami Vice caseback engraving to mark the film, and strapped a Vacheron Constantin to Colin Farrell for Crockett.

The Aquatimer is the stranger of Tubbs's two watches, and the better one. It dates from the years just before IWC redrew the Aquatimer line: a 44mm titanium case, an internal rotating dive bezel set from its own crown, water resistance to 120 meters. Its name points to a complication you almost never see on a diver. Beside the ordinary chronograph runs a second minute hand that can be stopped and held on command, letting you time a stretch longer than a minute without halting the main timer. It is an odd, almost overbuilt thing to fit to a dive watch. IWC later discontinued it, and that scarcity is most of why the people who spot it on Foxx's wrist are usually the ones who already knew the reference cold.

It belongs to the nighttime half of the job. Mann shot in Paraguay, Uruguay and the Dominican Republic, in real heat and real water, and a titanium diver is built for precisely that, a tool that keeps time while the operation around it comes apart. Mann does not explain his characters out loud, and he does not explain this. He gives Tubbs one watch for the daylight and another for the dark, and leaves you to decide what kind of man keeps two.