Roschdy Zem wears an Alpina Avalanche Extreme

Undercover drug enforcement films live or die on the performance of the man pretending to be someone else. Olivier Van Hoofstadt's Go Fast puts Roschdy Zem in the role of Marek, a French narcotics officer who infiltrates a Moroccan hash trafficking network operating between Spain and France. The film is lean and propulsive, closer to a procedural than a thriller, and Zem brings a coiled intensity to a character who has to be believable to both his handlers and the people he is trying to arrest.

The Alpina Avalanche Extreme is a sporty automatic chronograph from a brand that has always been more popular in Europe than in the United States. Alpina was founded in 1883 in Switzerland and spent most of the twentieth century making affordable, reliable tool watches. The Avalanche Extreme line was designed for extreme sports — oversized pushers, a unidirectional rotating bezel, and a case built to take abuse. For an undercover cop, it reads right: expensive enough to look like a successful criminal's watch, tough enough for fieldwork, and obscure enough that it doesn't draw the kind of attention a Rolex would.