No, META-tags are not magic bullets. You will not achieve top rankings on keywords if you only use them in your META-tags.
However, we still recommend you fill out your META-tags as some search engines do read and use the data. In those search engines it will give you a better chance of receiving relevant visitors if you have correct, optimized, and relevant META-tags on all your pages. Remember, only those words that appear in the main body of the page should be in the META-tags.