Car Movies We Dig: "Love The Beast"

Note: This is the first chapter in an ongoing series highlighting car movies that we dig.

Amazon Prime can be a blessing or a curse with its recommendations based on my previous viewings. The curse being if someone is watching Prime under my user profile and they think it might be a good idea for me to watch anything with Adam Sandler because my wife watched “Grandma’s Boy”.

The blessing is when I enjoyed “Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans” and it thought I might like “Love The Beast”.

With no preconceived notions, it’s a ‘Dave Thing’ to avoid movie reviews, I sat down and thoroughly dug “Love The Beast”.

The 2009 documentary is Eric Bana’s directorial debut and the love story between him and his 1974 Ford Falcon XB coupe.

I always associated Australian actor Eric Bana as Bruce Banner from the forgettable “Hulk” (2003) or as Avner from one of my favorites, “Munich”. I consider him a good actor, not Daniel Day-Lewis but definitely solid.

I was unfamiliar with his love of cars and racing. This was a good thing to learn and broadened my perceptions about him.

Bana bought the Falcon as a teenager and the perpetual project car was a means to get him and his buddies together to restore it. A young “Mad Max” fan bought the same type of car from the Mel Gibson movie and it was dubbed “The Beast”.

“When I was a kid, I dreamed of being a race car driver,” Bana said in the film. “If it had wheels and an engine, I wanted to drive it. Cars to me were what you lived for. There was nothing else. As I got older, fate, luck, and circumstance had other ideas.”

In 1996, after a long restoration, he drove it in the Targa Tasmania and promised that he would be there again. Bana would drive the rally 11-years later with a highly-modified “Beast” that was dolled up by professionals and not by his buddies.

Car Movies We Dig: “Love The Beast”

By David Castro | Mar 10, 2021