Paul Walker wears a Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Compressor

In April 2011, ten days before Fast Five opened in American theaters, the promotional photographs were already circulating, and in two of them Paul Walker's Brian O'Conner wore a chunky black dive watch, once on his left wrist and once on his right. The watch press worked from those photos and named it before most audiences had seen the film: a Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Compressor Diving Automatic Navy SEALs, the limited edition built out of Jaeger-LeCoultre's partnership with the US Navy's elite diving unit. A sharp-eyed regular on a dive watch forum got credit for pinning the exact version, reference 2018770, in stainless steel with a black ceramic bezel and Jaeger-LeCoultre's articulated rubber strap.

Catching it in the film itself takes more patience. The early write-ups noticed the same oddity: the watch appears in close shots and vanishes in wide ones, there in one angle of a scene and missing from the next. When it does surface you can pick out the black dial, the oversized luminous markers and the date window. Brian wears it at the wheel of a car and again as he shoulders a carbine, the segmented strap reading clearly against his wrist.

Fast Five is the film where Universal deliberately steered the franchise away from street racing and rebuilt it as a heist series, with Justin Lin directing and Puerto Rico standing in for Rio de Janeiro through most of the production. O'Conner is a fugitive by this point, hiding in Rio and helping plan the theft of a hundred million dollars of a drug lord's cash from a police evidence vault, with Dwayne Johnson's federal agent Luke Hobbs closing in on the crew. Hobbs spends the same film in a Panerai, so the hunter and the hunted wore watches from sister brands; both answer to the same parent company, Richemont.