Jason Butler Harner wears a Patek Philippe (fake prop)

For most of its length Non-Stop stays inside a single transatlantic cabin, and then the camera settles on a wrist. The co-pilot's watch fills the frame, a black dial with white baton markers and, under twelve o'clock, a signature that reads clearly: Patek Philippe, Genève.

Jaume Collet-Serra directed the 2014 thriller, and Liam Neeson plays Bill Marks, an alcoholic federal air marshal working a flight where a hijacker texts him a promise to kill one passenger every twenty minutes. The co-pilot is First Officer Kyle Rice, played by Jason Butler Harner, a small part until the climax, when a bomb tears open the fuselage and Rice takes the plane down to eight thousand feet and lands it in Iceland.

The watch is not a Patek. It is a chronograph with two pushers and a central seconds hand, its dial crowded with subregisters, one of them a day-of-the-week dial reading SUN, MON, WED. Patek Philippe builds nothing in that configuration. Wrist Enthusiast, working through the fake watches of film and television, calls it one of the worst fakes it has ever seen and wonders why the production bothered giving the co-pilot such a lousy watch.

Patek keeps out of product placement, and a genuine one rarely reaches the screen at all. The single time Non-Stop holds a Patek dial up to the light, clear down to the Genève beneath the logo, it is one the company never made.