Nicolas Cage wears a Ventura V-Tec Sigma

In Bangkok Dangerous the watch gets nearly as much screen time as the gun. Nicolas Cage plays Joe, a contract killer who flies into Bangkok to carry out four hits, and across the film the camera keeps finding the strange Swiss digital watch on his wrist. The Pang brothers directed this 2008 remake of their own 1999 Thai original, and somewhere in it the Ventura quietly became a second prop, as fixed to Joe as the silenced pistol.

The watch is a Ventura V-Tec Sigma, reference W25-R1, and it does not look like anything a hitman would choose. Designed by the Swiss designer Paolo Fancelli, it has a long curved case, almost boomerang shaped, machined from a hardened steel Ventura calls Durinox and capped with sapphire. There are no pushers. You drive it with a small scrolling wheel on the side that clicks through the time, a chronograph, a calendar, second time zones and alarms, all of it shown on a negative display with pale digits glowing on black. It is less a tool than a design object, which is exactly why the production picked it, for the futuristic look rather than anything a killer needs.

Cage is said to have liked the watch enough to wear it off screen as well. Ventura has since stopped making the V-Tec Sigma, so the film now holds a small piece of mid-2000s Swiss design that outlived its own production run, a digital oddity kept alive on the wrist of a Nicolas Cage assassin.