Jason Statham wears a Rolex Submariner

In 1980, a retired killer named Danny Bryce is pulled back into the trade. Killer Elite, Gary McKendry's 2011 directorial debut, sends Jason Statham's Bryce to hunt three former SAS men for an Omani sheikh whose sons were killed in the Dhofar Rebellion, and it gets him to do it by taking his old partner Hunter, played by Robert De Niro, and holding Hunter's life as the price of the job. The plot comes from Ranulph Fiennes's 1991 book The Feather Men, which Fiennes presented as a true account of a secret society of ex-SAS men looking after their own. Clive Owen plays Spike Logan, that society's enforcer, the man sent to stop Bryce.

On Bryce's wrist, through most of it, is a Rolex Submariner, a steel sports watch on a steel bracelet that you catch in the open-air scenes. The Submariner has a real claim to this world. It is the watch Rolex turned into the dive watches issued to British military divers, the tool a soldier could trust and then never take off. Statham is a serious Rolex collector off screen, which is why the obvious guess has always been that the Submariner here is simply one of his own.

And here is the catch. Nobody actually knows which Submariner it is. The reference that circulates online, the 114060, cannot be the one, because Rolex did not introduce the 114060 until 2012, a full year after the film reached cinemas. No watch publication of any standing has ever pinned Bryce's watch down, and the film gives them nothing to work with. It never lingers on the wrist. The watch is just there, keeping time and asking for no attention, which is exactly what a Submariner is built to do. His old partner Hunter wears one too.