Randy Couture wears a Panerai Submersible

The Expendables 2 opens with the team smashing into a compound in armored trucks, and the first thing anyone says to Toll Road is a complaint: keep this sucker steady, Toll. I am doing my best, he answers, and keeps driving. Randy Couture plays him, and when Barney Ross has to introduce the crew to an old contact later in the film, the roll call is short: Gunner, Toll Road, Hale Caesar and Maggie. The job is a downed plane in the former Soviet Union, the cargo is a map to a hidden Russian plutonium mine, and the production shot in Sofia, Bulgaria, in the fall of 2011.

Couture brought a resume to the franchise that no one else on the team could match in one respect. He is a three-time UFC heavyweight champion and a two-time light heavyweight champion, an Olympic wrestling alternate, a two-time NCAA Division I finalist at Oklahoma State, and the oldest champion in the history of mixed martial arts, having taken a title at 45. The Expendables is a franchise about aging hard men still doing the work. Couture is the one who did it with a sanctioning body keeping score.

Braced over a car hood with a pistol in both hands, he wears the team watch where the camera can read it: a Panerai Luminor Submersible 1950 3 Days Automatic Bronzo, reference PAM00382, unmistakable down to the crown-guard bridge over the winding crown, with a bronze cushion case, a green dial, and a brown leather strap. It was the first Panerai sports watch made entirely of bronze, an alloy of 92 percent copper and 8 percent tin that oxidizes into a darker patina the longer it lives on a wrist, a thousand pieces from 2011 at 11,600 dollars list. Stallone issued one to each Expendable: Couture, Lundgren, Statham, Crews, himself. The cast paid nothing. Stallone's own example sold at Sotheby's in 2024 as a screen-worn piece, and the catalogue names Couture among the co-stars who wore the same watch.