Willem Dafoe wears an unidentified watch

Lee Tamahori directed Die Another Day and then this, so he spent 2002-2005 making the most extravagant action movies Hollywood would finance. xXx: State of the Union replaced Vin Diesel with Ice Cube, which sounds like a lateral move but changed the tone entirely — Cube's Darius Stone is harder, less ironic, more direct. Simon Kinberg wrote the script. Samuel L. Jackson returns as Gibbons, the NSA handler, and Dafoe plays the villain, a five-star general and Secretary of Defense named George Octavius Deckert who is planning a military coup against the President. That name alone tells you everything about the register the film is operating at.

Dafoe in villain mode is one of the reliable pleasures of mid-2000s studio action — the man commits completely, even when the material does not always deserve it. A watch is visible on his wrist, unidentified, but consistent with a character who wears a military dress uniform and plots the overthrow of the government from the Pentagon. Whatever a fictional Secretary of Defense with a name like George Octavius Deckert would wear, it is probably something conservative and chosen to match a wall full of medals. The watch does not need to be interesting. The man wearing it is already doing all the work.