Liam Neeson wears a Hamilton Jazzmaster

In Taken 2, Bryan Mills spends much of the film moving through Istanbul with a pistol drawn. In one street scene he braces behind a parked yellow taxi, gun raised, and the watch on his extended left wrist is the only ordinary object in the frame. It is a plain round dress watch on a leather strap, pale dial, no logo.

Mills is the retired CIA operative Liam Neeson first played in 2008, the man with the particular set of skills that turned into a catchphrase. Olivier Megaton directed this 2012 sequel from a script by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, the pair who wrote the original. The setup inverts the first film. This time the families of the men Mills killed in Paris come looking for him, led by Murad, played by Rade Šerbedžija. Maggie Grace and Famke Janssen return as his daughter and ex-wife, and both are pulled into the kidnapping that drives the plot.

The watch is harder to pin down than the story. Its logo was painted out or digitally removed, so nothing on the dial names a maker. Watch enthusiasts who went through the close-ups frame by frame matched the case shape, the applied markers and the date window at three o'clock to Hamilton's Jazzmaster, the brand's steel-cased dress line. It is a fair match. But no brand or production source backs it, and with the logo gone the screen cannot confirm a maker, so the identification rests on the shape of the watch rather than anything you can read off the dial.