I Am The White Tiger is a 2019 documentary about stuntman, action director, and martial arts legend Mark Houghton and his story of breaking into the Hong Kong film industry.
For a long time, many got there Kung Fu kick on Saturday afternoon TV, where classic, very badly-dubbed asian fight movies made there way to new fans and old. These kinds of movies have greatly evolved of course, but the roots of these films are still cherished by those in admiration of where it all began. While asian actors and highly-skilled martial arts masters dominated these titles, including of course Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, who both made their way to Hollywood, many white actors and fighters found their way into these movies. Director Chiu Lee turns his camera on one such man in his latest film I Am The White Tiger, an intimate and in-depth look behind an incredible journey.
Mark Houghton is British but spent a great deal of his youth in Malaysia where he trained and studied White Crane Kung Fu before seeing a movie had him switching to Hung Gar. From there, he moved back to the UK and opened his own martial arts studio, eventually finding his way to Hong Kong to train with legendary kung fu master Lau Kar Leung and then into movies. It wasn’t long after, throughout the 90s, he became a very popular ‘bad guy’ in these films, his obvious skills making him a worthy participate in the rise of this genre around the world. He would be credited in more than 40 titles, including roles in Outlaw Brothers, Cheetah on Fire, Knock-Off (with Jean-Claude Van Damme) and Drunken Master II (with Jackie Chan).
Filmed without an on screen interviewer, Lee wisely lets Houghton tell his story without interruption, allowing the dynamic and exuberant silver-haired veteran an open stage to detail his strange odyssey. Walking and talking along pathways he tread upon both on camera and off, his tales of a sometimes dangerous life between films is as compelling as his exploits making them.
Houghton cuts a confident figure as we watch him through interviews over a few years, the actor in him taking to giving his story a kind of cinematic on-screen narration, where he tells of attacks on his life in a nightclub (leaving him with 400 stitches) and near countless on-set injuries that left him tracked with lacerations, bruises and after one bad fall, two replaced hips.
He recounts his battle with severe depression after this last incident, finding peace in SCUBA diving and bouncing back mentally and professionally. Like this, the film peels back the layers and offers a thorough exploration of a man with a truly fascinating history to consider. For fans of his work or of the films in general he took part in, it’s certainly is eye-opening, and Houghton makes for an intriguing tour guide along the way, his colorful indulgence into his own past well worth the trip, especially the more it gets going.
Packed with classic film clips of his 90s on-film action and some enlightening details about the people within, the movie is much more a personal look at a man who found his way into them then how they were made. It’s not a highly-polished endeavor, much like the movies he starred in, but it’s passionate about its subject and puts some humanity behind a star many only know from beat ’em ups on the big screen.