Rade Serbedzija wears a Simon Carter

For a man who is dead before the opening title, Dr. Vladimir Nekhorvich gets a remarkably good look at his watch. Mission: Impossible II, John Woo's 2000 entry in the series, opens on a hijacked plane, and in that pre-title sequence the camera drops into a tight macro of Nekhorvich's wrist. The dial fills the frame: a polished steel dress case on a black leather strap, a two-tone silver-and-white face, Roman numerals, slim leaf hands, and a small red-tipped hand pointing down toward five o'clock. Printed on it are two pieces of information: the brand, Simon Carter, and the function, Alarm Quartz.

The second crown at four o'clock and the red alarm hand make this an alarm watch. Its layout is a straight homage to the mechanical alarm classics, the Vulcain Cricket and the Jaeger-LeCoultre Memovox, where a second crown winds and sets a tiny hammer that buzzes against the caseback. Simon Carter's version does the same job with a battery and a quartz module. It looks like a watchmaker's complication and works like a clock radio.

Simon Carter is not a watch house at all. It is a London accessories and menswear label founded in 1985, best known for cufflinks, the kind of brand a department store stocks beside the ties. Carter earned the nickname King of Cufflinks for a 1995 design shaped like an aspirin tablet, and he had trained as an immunologist before turning to design. That makes for a small, accidental joke: the film's molecular biologist wears a watch from a label founded by a former immunologist.