Jason Statham wears a Panerai Luminor

There is a close-up early in Transporter 2 tight enough to read every word on Frank Martin's wrist. Louis Leterrier directed the 2005 sequel, which moved Statham's precise, buttoned-up driver from the French Riviera to Miami and swapped his BMW for an Audi, and kept everything that mattered: the tailored suit, the rules, the unnatural calm while the people around him come apart. The watch belongs to that calm.

The dial reads LUMINOR PANERAI, and under that, in cursive, Daylight. It is a Panerai Luminor Chrono Daylight, reference PAM00250: a forty-four millimeter steel chronograph with the brand's signature lever clamped over the crown. The dial is black. Three subdials sit across it, running seconds at nine, a thirty-minute counter at three, an hour counter at six, with the date squeezed between four and five, and the whole thing runs on Panerai's automatic OP XII, a movement built on the Valjoux 7753. It is a serious watch, and the film makes sure you see it.

Statham keeps reaching for Panerai. He has worn the brand across his films, from this Daylight to the Radiomir in The Fate of the Furious, in the years when an oversized Panerai became a kind of uniform for the on-screen tough guy. The patron saint of that era was Sylvester Stallone, who did more than anyone to make the brand famous and who wore a Luminor in a 1996 film called, as it happens, Daylight. It is tempting to draw a straight line from his movie to the name on Frank Martin's dial. The line is not as straight as the legend makes it. Frank Martin just needed a watch.