Awesome Music: The soundtrack of the film has some pretty decent tracks, and mixing compositions by Charlie Clouser and various rock ensembles, including songs such as Hageshisa to, Kono Mune no Naka de Karamitsuita Shakunetsu no Yami by Japanese Death Metal band Dir en grey. It also features music by Dead By Sunrise, Saliva, Boom Boom Satellites, Hinder, and Krokus.
Badass Decay: Jill Tuck. In Saw VI, she Took a Level in Badass and placed an upgraded Reverse Bear Trap on Hoffman, leaving him to die without any sign of remorse. After her plan fails, her badassness immediately goes away in this movie, and she willingly puts herself under Witness Protection while spending most of the movie sitting at a safe house or in a jail cell. But the worst part was at the end, where she starts screaming and wailing for help at the top of her lungs when Hoffman finds her in her cell.
Fan Nickname: Hoffman is popularly given the nickname "Hoffmanator" at the time he explicitly becomes a Spree Killer in this film and leaps on multiple levels of badass to the point that he may or may not have turned to an over-the-top persona for the series. The nickname itself is a Pun between "Hoffman" and "Terminator".
In the first film, Lawrence promises his daughter that he's not going to leave her. By the time this film rolls around, his wife's divorced him because of his mental instability and taken their daughter with her. Not to mention that he's now working with the same guy as the man who held her hostage, after telling her that "The Bad Man" didn't exist and wasn't hiding in her room.
Chester Bennington playing a victim of Jigsaw's traps became this when he committed suicide on July 20, 2017, the same day that the first trailer for Jigsaw came out.
Hilarious in Hindsight: A month after the movie's release, the infamous pink blood became far funnier when Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc came out in Japan, which also depicts blood as bright pink, though it was for censorship reasons rather than a deliberate change to depict it as the correct color in specific viewing formats. Incidentally, the visual novel is also about a Deadly Game, and its developers have cited the Saw series as one of its inspirations.
Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: Bobby is an obnoxious writer who pretended to be a past victim of a Jigsaw trap in order to earn fame and money. While Hoffman (his abductor) is at his absolute worst in this film, he eventually got a direct comeuppance via an And I Must Scream fate. Bobby, on the other hand, only received punishment through proxy due to failing to rescue all of his loved ones and staff from the gruesome traps he should have been put into himself, and while injured, he survives in the end.
Quoting Linkin Park lyrics in the Horsepower Trap, because of their late lead vocalist Chester Bennington playing its lead victim Evan. "Crawling" and "In the End" are especially popular for this, the former due to the line "crawling in my skin, these wounds, they will not heal" (itself highly memetic in its own right) and the fact that the trap involves Evan having to rip the skin from his back, and the latter for the line "I tried so hard, and got so far, but in the end it doesn't even matter", which describes Evan's struggle pretty well.
Dripsaw Explanation John's outfit in one of the flashbacks (including a hoodie and a backwards baseball cap) has attracted attention, especially in recent years, due to how out-of-place it looks for a man who otherwise wears simple casual clothes without much detail. The meme only spread further when Spiral later did a similar thing to depict a younger Zeke in another flashback, to the point that some fans are petitioning for the same to happen in the upcoming Saw X.
Nausea Fuel: The Silence Circle, where Bobby has to free Nina by trying to retrieve a key hanging on a fish hook inside her stomach. It doesn't help that he has to muffle Nina's screams while slowly pulling on the string tied to the hook, since the trap is connected to a sound meter, which in turn makes the whole scene excruciatingly long. It also doesn't help that, once he gets the hook out, apart from the key, there's a lump of flesh on it...
Replacement Scrappy: Gibson, who replaced far more well-regarded law enforcement officers in the series like Kerry, Eric, Rigg, Strahm and Perez. Unlike the others, he doesn't even survive halfway through this film.
Sequelitis: Saw 3D is the film in the franchise that receives the most hatred from the fanbase, mainly for its widespread use of 3D gimmicks (including numerous reminders to it with emphasis effects like slow motion), sacrificing of plot points in favor of more Gorn, and failing to do anything different with the formula that most of the sequels since 'Saw III had followed. Some see the film as falling straight into the Torture Porn nadir that the series used to mostly avert. The well-documented Executive Meddling during the film's Troubled Production didn't help things either.
So Bad, It's Good: While Saw 3D is widely seen as the worst film in the series overall, plenty of people (especially in the years after the film's release) have come to consider it worth watching or rewatching due to many of its elements being arguably over-the-top and thus pretty entertaining. This includes (but is not limited to) the egregious nature of the traps, the large amount of narm-y moments, and Hoffman's "badassery" in his spree killing.
The much maligned "pink blood" is often described as this. Behind the scenes shots show that the blood actually did look pretty real, but was changed to a pinkish color in editing so that it could still appear red in 3D viewings.
The Lawnmower Trap is mostly just a bad green screen.
In Jill's dream sequence, when she's sliced in half by the go-kart, both halves of her body are clearly a dummy full of fake gore.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Joyce’s death is one of the most frequently-maligned parts of the film, as she was one of the most innocent characters in this franchise’s Humans Are BastardsCrapsack World, whose only crime was believing her husband’s lies. Her death is made even worse by the fact that her husband Bobby survives, despite the fact that it was his lie which got them into this mess to begin with. Many feel the film would have been better if it was Bobby who died in the film’s closing moments, leaving Joyce the last one standing.
