Jason Statham wears a Panerai Submersible

Jason Statham plays Lee Christmas in The Expendables 2 (2012), Barney Ross's knife man, and the film commits to the bit where the villain is named Vilain and played, with total sincerity, by Jean-Claude Van Damme. Vilain kills the team's youngest member. The team goes to Bulgaria to settle it.

Statham's watch is a Panerai Luminor Submersible 1950 Bronzo, reference PAM00382. The case is bronze, 47mm of it, and the alloy is the point: bronze oxidizes, so the watch is built to darken and mottle differently on every wrist that wears it. Green dial, three-day automatic movement, one thousand made. It was the first Panerai sports watch cast entirely in bronze, and when it came out in 2011 it cost about eleven thousand dollars.

Statham did not buy his. Sylvester Stallone did, for the whole team. Stallone is the actor who put Panerai on Hollywood's wrist in the first place, an early adopter from back when almost no one outside Italy knew the brand, and he has a habit of dressing his casts in it. For Expendables 2 he handed a Bronzo to Lundgren, Crews, Couture, Statham, and himself. Five identical watches walked onto the same set and then started, slowly, to stop matching. Stallone's own went to Sotheby's in 2024 with a skull-studded strap and a note in his handwriting, and sold for ninety-six thousand dollars.