Terry Crews wears a Panerai Luminor

The Expendables (2010) strands its heroes behind cover on a small South American island, soldiers closing in, and hands the rescue to Hale Caesar. The team's heavy weapons specialist stands up, clears the field with an automatic shotgun, and then, with the soldiers down, delivers the line: remember this shit at Christmas. Terry Crews plays Caesar, and the film's stills lean on exactly this image of him, sunglasses pushed up on a backwards cap, shouldering the drum-fed shotgun, or raising it at the rear of the team as the five of them advance through a stone archway.

Crews came to the role from professional football, and the resume is stranger than the usual ex-jock story. He was a defensive end and linebacker who passed through five NFL organizations in the 1990s, the Rams, the Packers, the Chargers, the Redskins and the Eagles, and the playing time across all five came to thirty-two games. Two of those teams never fielded him at all. He spent 1995 with the Rhein Fire of the World League of American Football, retired in 1997, and moved to Los Angeles to try acting.

On Caesar's left wrist through all of this sits a Panerai, a big dark case on a strap, visible below the shotgun's drum. Which Panerai is a harder question than it sounds. The only watch anyone documented at the film's release was Stallone's, a Luminor 1950 Regatta Rattrapante, reference PAM332: a 44mm split-seconds chronograph in a blackened case, one of five hundred made, with a countdown function built for the start of a yacht race. Stallone is a Panerai collector, and accounts disagree about how far his enthusiasm reached into the rest of the cast. By one telling every member of the team wore the same PAM332. By another, the full-cast Panerai program began with the sequel. No one named the watch on Caesar's wrist, and the frames never get close enough to settle it.