Sean Penn wears a Casio Sports

Jim Terrier sits on a tufted couch in a dim, wood-panelled room and levels a pistol two-handed at whatever just came through the door. Sean Penn plays him in The Gunman (2015), a former special-forces contractor who, years after assassinating the Democratic Republic of the Congo's mining minister, finds his old employers trying to erase him. Penn co-produced the film and cast himself in the lead; Pierre Morel, who made Taken, directed.

The watch is right there in the aiming hand. It is a plain black resin digital sports watch, round case, textured bezel ring, a single LCD window, the kind of inexpensive black Casio a deniable contractor would buy by the handful and never think about again. The brand name does not resolve on screen, and the dial is never held still long enough to read a model number, so it stays a Casio at the brand level. That is the honest ceiling, and for this character it is also the fitting one. A man who has spent his life being deniable wears a watch with nothing to trace.