Dax Shepard, Michael Pena unveil trailer for 'CHiPs' adaptation

WASHINGTON (Sinclair Broadcast Group) — Dax Shepard has come a long way since “Punk’d.”

The one-time hidden camera prank show star has graduated to writing, directing and starring in his own films, the latest of which is a big budget reboot of “CHiPs.”

Starring Erik Estrada and Larry Wilcox as California Highway Patrol officers, the original series ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983.

Shepard and co-star Michael Pena debuted the upcoming film’s trailer on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” Wednesday, riding a motorcycle onto the stage in their uniforms. In this version, Pena plays an undercover FBI agent and Shepard’s character is a former extreme sports biker.

“CHiPs” also features Shepard’s wife and partner in home appliance promotion Kristen Bell, Vincent D’Onofrio, Maya Rudolph and Adam Brody.

The trailer is chock full of explosions, jokes and inadvertent crotch contact.

While the original series had a relatively light tone, the film adaptation appears to veer further into deliberate attempts at comedy. Shepard has compared it to the classics of the buddy cop action-drama genre.

“My aim was somewhere in the ‘Bad Boys,’ ‘Lethal Weapon’ world,” he recently told Entertainment Weekly. “That was my take on it. It’s interesting because it’s definitely a comedy, where the show is not, but the stakes are very real and the world is real and the physics are real and all those things are grounded.”

This is not the first attempt to stretch the show’s premise into a feature-length film. A made-for-TV movie featuring members of the original cast aired on TNT in 1999. The big screen version was in development for over a decade with Wilmer Valderrama attached to star before Shepard took the helm.

“CHiPs” hits theaters on March 24.