Christopher Plummer in "The Man in the Chair."

Flash Madden is a walking anachronism, but you see folks like him all the time. With his fedora, his full coat and his chin bristling full of whiskers, the old man does not fit into the streets of L.A. he walks down -- and he's kind of angry about that fact.

A former gaffer on flicks like "Citizen Kane," Flash (Christopher Plummer) is incensed by the way the elderly and animals are cast off by society at large.

He and his fellow crew members and cronies have been socked away into retirement homes; his home is nice. His friend Mickey (M. Emmet Walsh) is not so lucky, and lives in a crumbling home.

Flash channels his energy into drinking Wild Turkey, sitting on bus benches and heckling old films at the Beverly Theater, which is where high school student Cameron Kincaid (Michael Angarano) runs into him.

Cameron likes to steal cars; he gets into fights with other high schools, but he all he really wants is to win a competition that will give him a scholarship to film school.

He manages to bribe Flash -- and his retirement home friends -- into working on the film with him. They jump on the prospect with an immeasurable amount of glee.

"The Man in the Chair" has potential to be really good: The message and the actors are great, and this flick has a chance to reference lots of other old films.

In the state it's in now, though, the film is a mixture of an Afterschool Special, that kick-the-can episode of "Twilight Zone" and a PETA video about puppy cruelty. Add in bad dialogue and intermittent jumpy camera effects that don't add to the mood and "The Man in the Chair" gets a little 8tedious.

This isn't writer/director Michael Schroeder's first effort. He also wrote a movie called "Cyborg 2" in 1993; he directed "Cyborg 3," "Cover Me" and "The Glass Cage," but in "The Man in the Chair," despite the good ideas and good actors at his fingertips, Schroeder hasn't delivered a polished product.

Flash wouldn't be pleased. The man in the chair, the director, has to make all the decisions and think quickly. If you get half of them right, he notes, you're golden.

Flash also notes that one can't polish a turd. One might argue, though, that you can smudge something down into being turd8like, and such is the case here.