Jude Law wears an IWC

Halfway through Paul Feig's Spy, in a candlelit restaurant, Bradley Fine leans across a white-clothed table set with martinis and reaches for Susan Cooper's hand, and for a moment the film lets you believe the suave CIA man might actually feel something. He does not. Jude Law plays Fine as a Bond knockoff in full plumage: the tailoring, the bored charm, the gadgets, all of it aimed at the analyst, Melissa McCarthy's Cooper, who runs his missions from a basement full of bats and never gets the credit. The whole comedy lives in that gap between the spy who looks the part and the woman who can actually do the job.

The watch belongs to the costume. As Fine reaches across the table it shows at his cuff, a round dress watch on a dark leather strap, the kind of refined, costly-looking piece a man wears to make espionage read as a lifestyle rather than a job. In the warm restaurant light the dial goes dark and gives nothing away, no brand, no markings, only shape and polish. Which is the joke, in the end. Fine's whole appeal turns out to be surface, and even his watch keeps its secrets right up until Cooper becomes the one doing the actual spying.