Sylvester Stallone wears a Panerai Luminor

Barney Ross has always been the franchise's center of gravity, so Expend4bles opens by appearing to take him out, killing him off in the first act to set the rest in motion. Sylvester Stallone plays Ross as a man at peace with the arithmetic of the work. We do this for money, he says, choosing the job over friends and family, and the line lands like a confession he has been rehearsing for thirty years.

On his wrist is a Panerai, the cushion-cased dive watch Stallone has worn on screen and off since the mid-1990s. He began wearing the brand when it was still a little-known Florentine maker of instruments for the Italian Navy, and his oversized Luminors did as much as any advertisement to turn Panerai into a name American collectors would chase. Putting one back on Barney Ross is a kind of homecoming. The watch is too big, too blunt, too plainly built for a man who solves things with force, which is to say it is exactly right for this one.