Jason Statham wears an IWC Pilot's Watches

Watch the opening reels of Wrath of Man and you meet a man who gives away almost nothing. H is the new hire on an armored cash truck in Los Angeles, quiet to the point of menace, and for a long stretch Guy Ritchie lets you wonder whether he is slow or simply waiting. He is waiting. Beneath the guard's uniform is a crime lord named Mason Hargreaves, hunting the crew who killed his son in a robbery, and the calm is the disguise. In the back of the truck, his hands wrapped around a cash bag, he wears a black watch so dark it barely separates from his sleeve.

The watch is an IWC Pilot's Watch Double Chronograph Top Gun Ceratanium, reference IW371815, and it is not a prop. Statham owns it. IWC's chief executive, Chris Grainger-Herr, has said plainly that Statham buys and owns all his IWCs himself, which makes the most expensive object on set that day, around 14,600 dollars, something the actor brought from his own collection. The case is the interesting part. It is Ceratanium, a material IWC starts as a titanium alloy, machines into a case, and then fires in a kiln until oxygen works into the surface and turns it as hard as ceramic. The black is not paint. It is baked into the metal, so it cannot chip or peel, and on camera it reads as a watch that swallows light instead of returning it.

Under that black skin sits a split-seconds chronograph, what watchmakers call a rattrapante: two sweep hands stacked on the same axis, so you can time two events at once and still come back to a single total. It is a patient instrument, built to track more than one thing without losing the thread, which is more or less the job H has set himself. It would be easy to push that too far, and the film never asks the watch to carry any meaning. Still, the one piece of his real life that H keeps on his wrist is also the one object in the frame engineered to give nothing away.