Kevin Costner wears a Rolex Explorer II

McG directed 3 Days to Kill from a screenplay by Luc Besson and Adi Hasak, and the Besson signature is all over it: a burned-out spy, a European city, action that treats physics as a suggestion. Kevin Costner plays Ethan Renner, a CIA operative who learns he is dying and tries, in the time he has left, to be a father to the teenage daughter he barely knows in Paris, while Amber Heard's handler keeps dragging him back for one more job. The film cannot decide whether it is a thriller or a family comedy. Depending on your tolerance for tonal whiplash, that is either the problem or the charm.

There is a moment when Renner, in a beanie and sunglasses and a dark coat, holds a watch up close to the camera, and you get a clear look at it. It is a Rolex Explorer II, and not the modern one. The dial is black. The big straight twenty-four-hour hand is bright orange, the detail that earned the watch its Italian nickname, Freccione, the big arrow. This is the reference 1655, the original Explorer II, made roughly from 1971 to the mid-1980s. Rolex built the line in 1971 for cavers and polar explorers, people who could lose track of whether it was day or night, and gave it a fixed twenty-four-hour bezel and that orange hand so they could tell. No rotating bezel, no Cyclops over the date. It is one of the plainer sports Rolexes ever made, which is the whole point of it.

So the watch on Renner's wrist is not a current-production piece a wealthy spy would buy on a whim. It is a thirty-year-old tool watch, worn soft, the kind of thing a man keeps for reasons that have nothing to do with what it costs. For a character who has spent his life being invisible and is now running out of time, an old watch built to mark the hours underground is a quietly good fit.