Jason Statham wears a Panerai Radiomir

Arthur Bishop is a hitman who stages his kills as accidents, and Simon West's The Mechanic (2011), a remake of the 1972 Charles Bronson film, plays Jason Statham as a man of method: nothing hurried, nothing loud. The watch on his wrist has a second story the film never tells. It was not a prop. It was Statham's own.

The watch is a Panerai Radiomir Rattrapante, reference PAM00214, in steel with a black dial. A rattrapante is a split-seconds chronograph: two seconds hands stacked one over the other, so you can start them together, stop one to mark a split, and let it snap back to catch the other. It is one of the harder things a mechanical watch can do, set into the cushion case of Panerai's oldest design.

After the film, the watch changed hands. Its seller listed it on the Paneristi collectors' forum in 2014 as Statham's personal Panerai, worn through the filming of The Mechanic and lightly scratched from it, sold with a letter of authenticity. It surfaced again later at the dealer HQ Milton, still described as previously owned by Jason Statham.