Kevin Bacon wears a Pulsar PF3293

Sheriff Kretzer sits in the dirt with his back against his own patrol car, out on open grassland, looking like a man whose day has gotten away from him. Kevin Bacon plays him in Cop Car (2015), the small-budget thriller Jon Watts made just before Sony handed him Spider-Man: Homecoming. Kretzer is a corrupt small-town lawman, and the plot turns when two boys joyride off in his cruiser without knowing there is a man tied up in the trunk.

On his left wrist, half under a plaid cuff, is a dark, round sport watch on a black strap. Watch-spotters identify it as a Pulsar PF3293, an inexpensive analog quartz chronograph from Seiko's budget marque. The dial never resolves clearly enough on screen to read a brand or a model number off it, so what the camera actually gives you is the shape, a cheap black sport chronograph, the kind of watch a county sheriff skimming a drug operation would buy without thinking about it.

That is the whole of the watch's role. It stays on his wrist through everything that follows and never gets a hero shot or a line of dialogue. Pulsar is Seiko's least expensive nameplate, the marque you reach for when you want a Seiko movement and nothing else, and on Kretzer it reads exactly that way: functional, unglamorous, and beneath anyone's notice.