One of my issues with Dante as a filmmaker is his lack of any coherent viewpoint. He wants to simultaneously satirize and celebrate nostalgia and small town values and avoid any consideration of a message to his films with an "ain't I a stinker?" shrug. Small Soldiers is probably his best film and his clearest anti-corporate message, but even that has a "get with the times" old man attitude and a gleeful embrace of violence that seems to directly contradict everything else it's saying.