Jason Statham wears a Panerai Luminor

Somewhere in Transporter 3, the 2008 film, Frank Martin sits on a sunlit rock above the water and does the one thing these movies almost never allow him, which is nothing at all. He is fishing. The collar is open, the menace is switched off, and for a few seconds the camera holds on his left wrist long enough to read the watch. It is a Panerai. The cushion case and the little bridge clamped over the crown give it away. You do not need a name on the dial. The silhouette is the signature.

That glimpse is the most legible the watch ever gets, and that is the problem. Olivier Megaton shoots the action in fast, juddering cuts, so through the car chases and the brawls the watch only flickers past, never still long enough for a clean look. What you can fix is the model. It is a Panerai Luminor Chrono, a chronograph from the line built around that crown-protecting lever. What you cannot fix is the exact reference, and here the trail goes cold. The watch writers who chased it pinned a precise catalogue number only for the original film. For this one they get only as far as the model, a Luminor chronograph whose exact reference no one has settled.

Then there is the oddity buried in the end titles. Scroll to the bottom of Transporter 3 and you reach the usual roll of who dressed the cast: Ermenegildo Zegna, Brooks Brothers, Christian Dior, and, listed as the watch supplier, Hamilton. Not Panerai. Hamilton is an American-born, Swiss-owned house that has made a real business of putting its watches on actors, and somewhere in this production a deal was struck to do exactly that. Yet the watch on the star is plainly not one of theirs. Perhaps Hamilton dressed other players. Perhaps a placement shifted during filming and the credit roll never caught up. The film does not say, and I will not guess.

Frank Martin is a man whose whole trade is timing. He drives to a schedule he will not break, and in this story the clock is wired to his body: he and the woman in his car wear bracelets rigged to explode if either of them strays too far from it, so distance itself becomes a countdown. A character like that should own the most carefully documented watch in movies. He owns a Panerai no one can pin down, credited to a maker who did not make it.