Jason Statham wears a Panerai Radiomir

The best thing Jason Statham does in The Fate of the Furious is fight a planeload of gunmen one-handed, because his other arm is cradling a baby. Deckard Shaw, the assassin who killed Han, spends F. Gary Gray's 2017 sequel switching sides, and the turn lands in that scene: Shaw clearing Cipher's plane while shielding Dom Toretto's infant son, a pair of headphones clamped over the baby's ears so the gunfire will not wake him. It is played for laughs, and it works. The villain becomes the reluctant ally, and the audience forgives him in real time.

On his wrist through all of it is a Panerai Radiomir 8 Days, reference PAM00384. It is the all-black version: a 45-millimeter case in ceramic rather than steel, matte and dark enough that one watch writer called it a stealth look. The Radiomir is the older of Panerai's two shapes, a clean cushion with thin wire lugs soldered to the flanks, no crown-protecting bridge over the winder. The dial gives away what is inside. A linear gauge runs across it to track the power reserve, and the reason it needs one is the movement: Panerai's hand-wound P.2002, which holds eight full days of running, a hundred and ninety-two hours, so a watch you forget on Monday is still ticking the following week.

What the watch means to Shaw, the movie never says. He does not wind it on camera, or check it in a tense moment, or so much as glance down at it. It is simply the watch he has on. The Fate of the Furious is not interested in making the Panerai mean anything. It is interested in the baby.