Jason Statham wears a TAG Heuer Monaco

The robbery at the center of The Bank Job actually happened. In 1971, thieves tunneled into the vault of a Lloyds Bank branch on Baker Street in London and emptied the safe-deposit boxes, and the case went quiet in a way that fed decades of rumor. Roger Donaldson's 2008 film turns that silence into a story about blackmail photographs and corrupt police, with Jason Statham as Terry Leather, a car dealer in debt who takes the job because the money is too big to refuse. Statham plays him smaller than usual, a man in over his head rather than a man who can punch his way out, and the film is better for it.

Near the end, the camera does something it does for nothing else in the film. It stops, in close-up, on Terry's wrist while he waits on a platform at Paddington Station. The watch is a TAG Heuer Monaco: a square steel case, a deep blue dial, two white sub-dials at three and nine, a red chronograph hand. It is a beautiful object, and it is in the wrong decade. The square Monaco is real to 1971, since Heuer launched it in 1969, but the one on Terry's wrist reads TAG Heuer on the dial, and TAG did not buy Heuer until 1985. A 1971 car dealer is wearing a watch that could not exist for another fourteen years.

There is a small joke buried in the choice, whether the production meant it or not. The Monaco became famous because Steve McQueen strapped one on in Le Mans, a racing film released in 1971, the same year Terry and his crew were tunneling under Baker Street. So the watch the movie lingers on is a modern reissue of the very watch that turned heads the year the real robbery happened, worn by a car dealer who, of all people, would know a motorsport icon when he saw one. The film never points at any of this. It just holds the shot a beat longer than it needs to and lets you find the watch yourself.