You haven’t been seeing double on your Netflix menus this autumn. Jack Whitehall does have two different, yet related projects on the streaming platform.
One is a semi-scripted travelogue spoof, Travels With My Father, and if you watch that first, it might help you laugh at Whitehall’s stand-up jokes about his dad even more, or decide whether you want to watch his solo work at all.
For my taste, the 29-year-old comes across more often than not as one of those millennials who think they’re experiencing or discovering something we hadn’t well figured out already.
As I wrote in my review for Decider:
Much of this hour, though, plays out as you might expect from a man-child who hasn’t agreed to become an adult just yet.
There’s an appeal in such childishness when he dissolves into giggles realizing he has swapped the real name for the fake name he was supposed to use for Netflix; less so when he’s bemoaning the idea of staying sober at a wedding, or playing gay for laughs.
There’s also a bit about how Whitehall’s American manager promises him great movie roles, only to find they’re not so great or large. It’s slightly undermined by his joke about how his father encourages him to take a handicapped part for the Oscar bait (seeing as that already was a major recurring joke in the movie, Tropic Thunder), but Whitehall nevertheless gets mileage out of both that and his experiences playing opposite R-Patz or a misbegotten press tour for his part in the Disney hit, Frozen.
Read my full review of Jack Whitehall: At Large on Decider.