Rowan Atkinson wears an IWC Pilot's Watches

Johnny English is the spy who gets everything wrong, and in Johnny English Strikes Again he gets called back to work precisely because the smart people have failed. A cyberterrorist has exposed every active British agent, so the service reaches for the one man whose identity was never in a database, a substitute geography teacher played by Rowan Atkinson. David Kerr's 2018 film leans on the joke of an analog throwback let loose in a digital crisis, a man who distrusts the modern world being asked to save it from a threat he barely understands.

On his wrist, doing the quiet work of suggesting he might actually be competent, is an IWC Pilot's Watch Mark XVIII Edition "Le Petit Prince." It is a real and serious instrument: a forty-millimeter steel case, a blue sunburst dial with silver Arabic numerals and a date at three, worn here on a matching steel bracelet. Inside is the automatic caliber 35111 with around forty-two hours of reserve, and a soft-iron inner case that shields the movement from magnetism, the kind of feature aviators once genuinely needed. The whole watch is built to be trusted in a cockpit, which is the point.

The "Le Petit Prince" line is IWC's running tribute to Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the author of The Little Prince, who was himself a working pilot. The editions carry a small engraving of the Little Prince on the caseback. So the watch English wears is named after a children's book about an aviator who crash-lands alone in the desert, strapped to the wrist of cinema's least reliable agent. It is a quietly perfect bit of casting. The comedy works because the watch is not a prop gag. It is the genuine article, the precision tool that fighter pilots and intelligence officers really do wear, sitting on the one man least equipped to live up to it.