Tom Cruise wears an IWC Ingenieur

Vincent has a list of five names and a single night in Los Angeles to clear it. Michael Mann's Collateral (2004) puts Tom Cruise in a grey suit and grey hair as the contract killer, moving between hits in the back of Jamie Foxx's cab, and Mann shot almost all of it after dark on the then-new high-definition video cameras that could capture the real city at night without drowning it in light. The Los Angeles that results glows and hums and looks faintly predatory, and Vincent slides through it like part of the scenery. That is the whole job: be no one worth remembering until the gun is out.

On his wrist is an IWC Ingenieur. IWC built the first one in 1955 for engineers and laboratory staff, wrapping the movement in a soft-iron inner cage so the magnetic fields of a working lab could not disturb its timekeeping, and in 1976 Gerald Genta, the designer behind the Royal Oak and the Nautilus, gave the line the clean, faintly severe shape it still carries. No dive bezel, no chronograph, no complication that asks to be looked at: a round case, a dark dial, a date. Mann is a director who dresses his characters in real, specific watches, and two years later he would run all of Miami Vice through IWC. Here the choice is quieter. An Ingenieur reads as a serious watch to the few who know it and as nothing in particular to everyone else, which is exactly what a man being forgettable on purpose needs on his wrist.

The exact reference is where the internet gets confident and gets it wrong. You will find the watch called the Ingenieur "Vintage" IW3233 in a dozen places. That watch is real, but IWC did not release it until 2008, four years after the film, for the company's 140th anniversary, so whatever Vincent wears in 2004, it cannot be that one. The careful sources name no reference at all, and on a dial this plain there is nothing to argue over anyway. It is not even Cruise's only IWC on screen: three years earlier, in Vanilla Sky, he wore the Pilot's Watch Mark XV. The brand has a way of turning up on the wrist of a man a film wants you to take seriously, and then getting out of the way.