Nikolaj Lie Kaas wears a Rolex

In Ron Howard's Angels & Demons (2009), the killer hides where no one looks for one. Robert Langdon, played by Tom Hanks, races across Vatican City to stop the murder of four kidnapped cardinals, one an hour, as a plot built on the old fear of the Illuminati closes in on the Church. Nikolaj Lie Kaas plays the man keeping that timetable, billed only as the Assassin. In the still that survives from his scenes he stands in a black clerical collar inside a candlelit crowd of nuns and priests, holding a lit red votive candle, scanning the room with the flat attention of a man counting exits rather than praying. It is the film's quiet joke about him, a hired murderer moving through the faithful he has come to thin out, and it is the closest the camera gets to his wrist, which the crowd and the candle keep out of frame.

A two-tone Rolex is the watch most often hung on the character, the steel-and-gold dress piece that reads as anonymous money on a man who kills for it, but no released frame shows it clearly enough to read, so the brand stays a guess rather than an identification. The one Rolex the film genuinely owns belongs to the hero. Langdon wears a childhood Mickey Mouse watch, a real prop that later sold at auction engraved "Screen used by Tom Hanks as Prof. Langdon," which means the documented timepiece in Angels & Demons is a cartoon mouse on the professor's wrist, not luxury steel on the assassin's.