Anyone who suffers traumatic flashbacks to The Da Vinci Code when reading that headline might not need to worry. According to Variety, Universal has acquired Leonardo, a spec screenplay written by Jonny Kurzman that will be produced as a feature by Charles and Lawrence Gordon. (If that latter name rings a bell, it’s because he’s been behind films like Die Hard, Predator, Field of Dreams, Boogie Nights, and Watchmen, to name a few.)

Solid information on the script’s contents are eluding us at the moment, but Variety describes it as an action-adventure story following “da Vinci’s quest to stop Renaissance Europe from returning to the Dark Ages.” Comparisons to the most recent Sherlock Holmes movies are already springing up; let’s hope it’s better than that.

The idea of an action movie following da Vinci — a man known as an intellectual, making some of the biggest contributions to art and design in human history — is, on its face, absurd. But taking his history into account, you almost know that he’ll invent something to save the day — or the story will play out wherein one of his greatest inventions was actually created to save the day! A-ha!

I have something of a rule, however, which prevents me from judging the plot summaries of scripts before the actual films come to fruition; there’s simply too extensive a process from page to screen to make a snap judgement like that. It does sound a little dumb, yes, but don’t deny that many great movies could sound silly when described in only a single sentence. Lawrence Gordon also has a decent track record in his career, so I’ll just put some faith in him deciding to pick this up for now.

How does Leonardo sound to you?