Pierce Brosnan wears a Lorus Chronograph

In a Belgrade underpass, Pierce Brosnan's Peter Devereaux shoves Olga Kurylenko's Alice Fournier against a brick wall and leans in close, and the watch on his left wrist comes into the frame as his hand grips her shoulder. It is a round steel chronograph with a dark, multi-register dial and a pair of pushers on the right of the case, slung on a green olive fabric strap that reads, against the blue of his suit, as the most deliberately unglamorous thing in the shot. This is Roger Donaldson's The November Man (2014), in which Brosnan plays a retired CIA operative pulled back into the field after an extraction goes wrong, and the watch is a Lorus RF847CX9, a quartz chronograph built on Seiko's YM92-X156 caliber, rated to roughly 50 meters.

Lorus is the budget line of the Seiko Group, which tells you most of what you need to know about Devereaux. He is a man who has no interest in being worth robbing. The RF847CX9 was reportedly discontinued around 2010, so by the time cameras rolled it was already an old, hard-to-find piece off a shelf nobody was watching, which is exactly the kind of object a burned-out spy living on a pension and a lifetime of paranoia would choose. The identification itself came the slow way: a fan tracked down the reference by writing to Lorus directly, and the green-strapped chronograph has since become a small collector curiosity purely because of this film.

There is a quiet joke in it. Brosnan is the actor most associated with the luxury spy watch, the man whose James Bond wore Omega for four films, and here he plays an ex-spy on a cheap Seiko-family quartz with a nylon band. The watch does not draw attention, measures time and intervals, and would not be worth the trouble of stealing. For Devereaux, that is the whole point.