Ed Helms attached to new 'Naked Gun' movie

Paramount is planning to resurrect Frank Drebin for a new Naked Gun movie.

Surely, you can’t be serious.

Forgive me for mixing my Leslie Nielsen movies — and don’t call me Shirley — but I’m dead serious. Tragic-blimp-accident-over-the-Orange-Bowl-on-New-Year’s-Day serious.

As Variety initially reported this morning, The Hangover‘s Ed Helms is attached to the project, stepping into the sometimes-wrong, but never-in-doubt shoes of dimwitted cop Frank Drebin.

Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, who created Police Squad!, the short-lived TV series that starred Nielsen as Drebin and inspired the three successful Naked Gun comedies, are not involved with the new movie. Instead, Reno 911! creators Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant are working on the script (which makes sense since they appreciate the importance of an exclamation point in a title.) The pair recently wrote Night at the Museum 3 for Fox.

Though Nielsen mastered the hilarious combination of confidence and incompetence with his trademark deadpan delivery, Helms seems like a promising choice to play the bumbling cop. His Andy Bernard on The Office had some Drebin DNA. Of greater curiosity, perhaps, is casting the role of Nordberg, Drebin’s oft-injured colleague on the force, played in the films by O.J. Simpson. If the producers decide to go with another ex-athlete who has not been accused of murder (yet), can I nominate Sammy Sosa?