Aneesa Wardle
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de)
"Bibi & Tina: Mädchen gegen Jungs" is a German 110-minute movie that premiered about a year ago, in January 2016. The writer and director is Detlev Buck (script co-writer with Bettina Börgerding) and it is his third film from the Bibi&Tina series. Next year, the fourth and probably final entry will be released. The two title characters are once again played by Lina Larissa Strahl and Lisa-Marie Koroll and in terms of their performances we get what we could expect from the first films. Strahl shines through solid acting most of the time and also manages to go over the top fairly convincingly, but Koroll is fairly cringeworthy most of the time. Besides, her constantly struggling relationship with her boyfriend is a plot that has truly been overused by now because we know anyway in the end they will be getting back together. Also what I did not like is that the real Bibi&Tina references have almost completely vanished by now. Yes there is a scene here and there involving witchcraft, all for comedic purposes, and they sometimes ride on the horses too, but it has really become a sub-plot only.Instead the film this time focuses on the eternal gender conflict, boys vs. girls in the kids-friendly version. Bibi and her friends keep clashing several times into the boys, but all in a very harmless and frequently very loud and music-packed way. I would say that thinks film has even more music than usual compared with the other two. And it is a very fine line for the music. Some of it is accurate and fun, some of it even lets your inner child out, but some of it (like the "fire" song) is pretty cringeworthy sadly. Nonetheless I believe that the music is not really the problem here at all. The story is so-so, some good moment, some bad and I have not yet made my mind up about the character transformation of Kakmann (Hübner), who was the antagonist in the first films. You can basically say that this movie we have here succeeds, if at all, only with his comedic and fun moments. Every time, it tries to be more serious (the fire, the relationship struggles, the blame etc.) it misses the mark mostly. I think this is something that was handled better in the previous films. Then again, story-wise this was relatively underwhelming anyway, the schnitzeljagd part was fine initially and also somewhat fun in the first sequences, but then it becomes old fairly quickly and the rest of the movie just did not feel as interesting anymore. I still would not say this was a bad film, not at all, but unlike the first two films, this one here is really only for children sadly and it lacked on several departments, especially depth. I cannot recommend this to anybody over 16. Thumbs down and I hope Buck steps things up again for the final installment.
