Bibi & Tina: Perfect Pandemonium (2017) User Reviews

The Lightness is Gone

[NicolaiLevin · 5/10 · 21 March 2017]

For all you non-German IMDb users: Where shall I start? There is a very popular German series of books / audio books / animated TV shows called 'Bibi Blocksberg' about an ordinary girl with (good and nice and helpful) witchcraft abilities. It aims at 4 to 8 year old's, mainly girls.

There is a spin-off to that series called Bibi & Tina which lets the heroine witch Bibi spend her holidays at a horse camp, befriending the owners' daughter Tina. This aims at 6 to 10 year-old girls, mixes the witch-girl genre with girl-horse-adventures which should sound completely silly to you all but works beautifully with the target audience and is a tremendous success selling books, CDs, and TV air time.

Some years ago, Bibi & Tina made their full-feature cinema debut. The film was a surprise success, not only at the box office, but it also received positive reviews. Director Detlev Buck has a track record of some excellent German comedy movies, and he did a good job in shifting the setup to targeting a more grown-up audience of 8 to 14 year old's. It was nicely filmed (for German standards), the kids just loved it, and there were also some jokes added for the accompanying parents.

So they made a sequel and another sequel, and Bibi & Tina 4 is the last of the line.

So much for introduction.

The plot of the 4th movie is about a girl that fled from Albania to avoid being married to some elder man. Her uncle and her cousins follow her to Germany and try to catch her. Another cousin, living in Germany, is called for support, but him being more Western and modern in his mindset (and even more so: gay), he is not much of a help. Also meet two refugees from Syria, one stuck with his traditional views and supporting the Albanian villains in their hunt, while his little brother is on the girl's side promoting individual freedom of choice and gender equality. Also meet a group of musicians from Mali touring Europe and coming on Castle Falkenstein to test the elder count's tolerance (his son is Tina's boyfriend, in case you shouldn't know).

If this sounds all very constructed and over-the-top to you, you are right. The filmmakers try to take the most prevailing society issues and discussions in Germany (which were in 2016: refugees and integration and the conflict between Western values and traditional Muslim views) and make them the plot driver of their movie.

For me this didn't work too well. The film is lacking the somewhat silly charm of its predecessors. The makers tried just too hard to make it relevant and up to the time.

However, the present rating of this at IMDb is below 4 and I don't think that this is a fair representation. To me, a critical 5 of 10. And one star alone goes to the very funny parody of Donald Trump (this was shot before he was elected US President!) as greedy orange-faced constructor Dirk Trumpf.

Maybe it is the right decision to end the series here

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 12 April 2017]

"Bibi & Tina: Tohuwabohu total" is a German 110-minute movie from 2017, so very new and fresh and it is the 4th entry to the Bibi Blocksberg (&Tina) series by writer and director Detlev Buck. And as before he worked with Bettina Börgerding on the script for this one here. According to Buck himself, this is the final chapter to the story, so did they manage to go out on a high note? Unfortunately not. There is major focus on the refugee crisis in this movie here and the other reviewer is correct in saying that the lightness is gone. I am not too sure how appropriate the subject here is. Sure it's nothing bad to teach younger audiences about what is going on in the world, but it just did not fit in tone and style compared to the previous three films. I'd have preferred another core plot here. Anyway, they tried to go for that in the third movie (the only one I did not see at a theater) and it also went pretty wrong there. Maybe the best would have been if the series had ended after the second movie as the first two managed pretty decent quality and were among the better (if not best) German kids films of the 21st century. But if you rush so many films within such a short period of time, it's not really a surprise when it goes wrong at some point.

So yeah, the biggest problem was that the movie was simply trying to be too much: the main story with Lea von Acken's character (I liked the actress more in other projects than here), the story with this group of African musicians, the two refugee boys, the Trump parody... Yes there were good moments about some of these two like for example it was funny how much of a Casanova one boy was, but still, focus on the Adea story, maybe one other and it would have been perfectly fine at slightly under 90 minutes. And maybe they also should have done with the story errors, like why does the Albanian girl speak German throughout the entire film if Bibi's spells only last for a couple hours at best? Away from that again: Oh yeah, the Trump story was the worst of the worst really unfortunately. Embarrassing stuff and I am pretty disappointed by Buck that he basically includes such cringeworthy stuff that was really on BILD level in terms of level of quality and entertainment. Just like in the previous films, the magic (actually a crucial aspect on the Bibi Blocksberg cassettes) was just a minor component here. Nobody is surprised by Bibi's abilities anymore and this is not at all what the film is about. It is all about teens having a good time like the previous films and maybe this one here is a bit more serious with the way it elaborates on world politics and sometimes actually takes itself pretty seriously there. Not fitting for a kids movie if you ask me. Finally the music: Man some songs were really cringeworthy and this refers to all males except the one who falls in love with the African singer and he is by far the best singer in the cast. Strahl and Koroll also don't come close to his rendition of the Bibi&Tina main there, even if it is nice to hear it from somebody else, actually the main person in this song. The girls are slightly better than the men overall, but also nothing special. When they sing some of the old songs "Up Up Up", it's nice to listen to, but the new songs for this movie (with one exception perhaps) are a complete mess and the way they tried to fit them in with the story just isn't working at all. To end the review on a positive note, I would like to say that I enjoyed Maertens again with his character like in the previous movie and while Strahl left me a bit unimpressed this time I kinda liked Koroll in here for the first time. I think she was really bad in the other films at times, but is surprisingly bearable in this final chapter, maybe because there is really no great drama to her in here and she somehow makes the comedy work. But as a whole, it wasn't on par with the good films 1 and 2. Don't watch.

Waste of time

[ivana-v-davidovic · 1/10 · 6 February 2019]

My kids are HUGE fans of Bibi & Tina movies, and this was a HUGE letdown for them, but barely watchable for us too. The plot is by no means ment for children, over ambitious and porly executed. If you loved Bibi and Tina before, non of the reasons why you loved them were in this movie.... Also, for a very politicly oriented movie for children (and yes, this was it), it is full of small but very inacurate facts, hardly missed by any adult... Not worth anybody's time. Loved all the other parts, but this is just horrible.

A string of xenophobic prejudices

[thpluimers · 1/10 · 12 June 2022]

My daughter didn't notice it, but it was unbearable for us parents. Lots of prejudices in a story that is no longer for children. It was xenophobic, misogynistic and wrapped in a sweet friendship story. The topic of forced marriage was really not at all suitable in this way and for the target group.