Saw | Saw II | Saw III | Saw IV | Saw V | Saw VI | Saw 3D | Jigsaw | Spiral | Saw X
- Captain Obvious Reveal: Both of the movie's main twists fall right into this:
- Between the video for the first trap being roundly unsubtle ("Today, five will become one with the common goal of survival.") and the chambers in the second trap clearly being large enough to fit more than one person, most people immediately figured that the victims of the Fatal Five were meant to work together.
- Hoffman successfully framing Strahm and getting him killed is handled so poorly that it doesn't even come across as a twist ending.
- Ensemble Dark Horse: While the film is often seen as one of the worst in the series, fans certainly have taken a liking to Brit. While she's underdeveloped, by no means a good person like the other four, and is the one responsible for the main game, she's also probably the smartest character across the entire franchise. For instance, she, after surviving the necktie trap, is shown smashing the glass boxes with her shoe and taking the keys, and also immediately has the smarts when it comes to the bathtub trap. In fact, fans continually held out hope that she'd show up in VI or 3D. Saw 3D confirms that Mallick survived since he's shown at Bobby's survivor group meeting, so it's implied that she's also still alive, since he was in worse shape than her.
- Heartwarming Moments: Mallick and Brit, respectively mutilating their left and right hands to fill up a twisted bloodbank, coming together through the intense agony and shock to hold hands with their remaining unafflicted arms so as to get through the ordeal can help sweeten a severely cringey and repulsively violent scene for some viewers.
- Memetic Mutation': KILLING! IS! DISTASTEFUL! Explanation
- Retroactive Recognition: Joseph Seed was Mallick, one of the Fatal Five.
- Sequelitis: Saw V is widely considered to be one of the weakest entries in the series, with the main criticisms being that too much of its running time is spent in putting Hoffman into the events of past entries, Strahm doesn't really get much accomplished other than running around and stating the obvious, and that most of the five characters in the main game are underdeveloped and hard to root for. Still, fans seem to agree that the actual trap scenes — especially the opening Pendulum Trap, the "5 Pints of Blood", and the Glass Coffin — are some of the most intense in the series, which, along with it being one of the few post-Saw II sequels not to fall back on the "person undertakes a series of games in order to save people connected to them" formula, at least puts it ahead of Saw 3D and arguably Jigsaw in most fans' estimations.
- Special Effect Failure: In several shots, it's quite obvious that the "glass" shards in the Glass Coffin are actually made out of rubber.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Agent Strahm had a lot of fans when he was introduced to the franchise, and was one of the savviest law enforcement members ever introduced, so the set-up of Strahm vs. Hoffman that begins the film led to a disappointing pay-off by the films end. Even more than a decade after the film debuted, there are a number of people that hate the fact he's killed off when he is, and how.
- Trapped by Mountain Lions: The Fatal Five and their reasons for being tested have almost nothing to do with the "Strahm vs. Hoffman" plotline (other than Erickson arriving to their scene), or even Hoffman or John's backstories. You can feel that their trial was only added to keep the film's length from being too short in comparison to other Saw films. It was later confirmed by Kevin Greutert that they were meant to find evidence that would make them believe Strahm was the new Jigsaw Killer responsible for abducting them, adding to Hoffman's frame job in the ending, but this plotline was cut.
