Jean-Claude Van Damme wears a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona

On the eve of the 1997 handover, with Hong Kong about to pass from British to Chinese rule, Tsui Hark drops Jean-Claude Van Damme into the middle of a counterfeiting plot. Van Damme plays Marcus Ray, a jeans man who runs fashion shows for a label called V-Six and is known around the markets as the king of knock-offs. The fakes turn out to be rigged: tiny, powerful nanobombs hidden inside counterfeit goods, from baby dolls to the studs on a pair of jeans. Rob Schneider plays his partner, Tommy Hendricks, who is really a CIA agent using Marcus as cover to reach the people behind the bombs. Hark films all of it at his usual breakneck pace.

The one published note on Marcus's watch calls it a steel Rolex Cosmograph Daytona with a white dial. Rolex launched the Daytona in 1963 as a tool for drivers, its bezel marked with a tachymeter scale for working out average speed, and for years it sold slowly. By the late 1990s that had reversed completely. The current steel model, the automatic reference 16520 that Rolex built from 1988 to 2000 around a modified Zenith El Primero movement, had become one of the hardest watches in the world to buy at retail, with waiting lists measured in years. No clear shot of the dial survives to confirm which Daytona is on Van Damme's wrist, so the steel white-dial reading stands as the single account rather than a settled identification.