Steven Seagal wears a Rolex GMT-Master II

In Hard to Kill, Mason Storm stops at a payphone on a Los Angeles street at night, the receiver against his ear and a pink neon sign burning behind his head. The shot frames the hand bracing the phone, and a gold watch on a gold bracelet catches the light. Steven Seagal plays Storm, an LAPD detective who has just caught a powerful man on tape ordering a killing. That night gunmen come to his home. They kill his wife and shoot Storm, then leave him for dead. He survives. The film picks him up seven years later, out of a coma and back for the men who put him there.

The watch is a Rolex on a Jubilee bracelet, the five-piece-link band the company has fitted since 1945, and that much is plain in the frame. The model is the hard part. ChronoMaddox and the blog Beauty and Aikido both call it a Rolex GMT-Master II, the version with a 24-hour bezel and a fourth hand for a second time zone. ChronoMaddox is not even sure of the metal, listing it as gold or as steel and gold. Neither gives a reference number, and the payphone shot never turns the dial toward the camera, so the GMT-Master II is a collector's reading rather than a confirmed call. What the picture settles is narrower: a gold Rolex, on the wrist of a man who is, for the moment, still a detective.

The GMT-Master was built for pilots who needed the hour in two places at once. If the collectors have the model right, Storm takes that call wearing a watch made to track a second clock, just before the film stops his own for seven years.