It is a bit difficult to actually review this film, because it is like two completely different movies spliced together. There is the 'documentary' part about the rise and fall of a porn star, and then there are the porn segments, which are hot but don't add a thing to the plot.

I thought the documentary portion of this was good. It was realistic, especially the interviews with other porn stars about Gia. Ron Jeremy was superb in his interviews. While Sunny Leone is not an academy award winning sort of actress by a long shot, she did an adequate job of portraying a porn star who falls into addiction problems and comes to a bad end. The make-up was a bit over-done in the scenes where she was on drugs (actually made us laugh in one scene, she looked like a raccoon more than an addict). The drug scenes were not realistic, but still, we got the idea.

Then there were the sex scenes. They were hot, if a touch vanilla, but they did nothing to advance the plot. They just sort of showed up. There was the usual moaning from the women that gets very old very fast. It was sort of like, 'here is the porn segment of the show' and just wasn't cohesive to the story.

I think you could approach this as two different movies. You could take the option of just watching the sex scenes independently of the story and then watch the movie and fast-forward through the sex scenes. It might make for a more understandable way of viewing this. Then the sex scenes would not detract from the plot and might make the plot easier to follow.

All in all, I feel the makers tried really hard to make a movie that is different from the run-of-the-mill porn flick. They get 3 stars for effort.