Mark Wahlberg wears an Omega Speedmaster

Rupert Wyatt's The Gambler (2014), a William Monahan reworking of the 1974 James Caan film, casts Mark Wahlberg as Jim Bennett, a literature professor at an LA university who leads a second life as a high-stakes gambler bent on losing everything. John Goodman plays Frank, the loan shark who delivers the film's blunt sermon on what real freedom costs. Brie Larson is Amy, one of Bennett's students. Bennett borrows from rival lenders, plays them against each other, and lectures his class on genius and mediocrity while methodically dismantling his own life.

Bennett wears an Omega Speedmaster, and the film does something most movies never bother with: it says the watch out loud. In a pawn shop, trying to raise cash, he sets it on the counter and pitches it like the salesman he is: 'It's an Omega, it's worth more than six thousand brand new, and when you have it, no one will know it isn't brand new.' The broker offers a fraction of that. The exact model has never been settled. It is plainly a Speedmaster, a black-dial chronograph, but the case looks large for the hand-wound Moonwatch and the bracelet matches no standard Speedmaster, so it sits somewhere between the Moonwatch, the bigger automatic Co-Axial, and a parts-bin put-together. None of that changes the point: it is a real watch worth real money, just nowhere near enough to mean anything against what Bennett owes, or against a man determined to lose.