I would be inclined to do a one liner with a ternary if.
var bool_value = value == "true" ? true : false
Edit: Even quicker would be to simply avoid using the a logical statement and instead just use the expression itself:
var bool_value = value == 'true';
This works because value == 'true' is evaluated based on whether the value variable is a string of 'true'. If it is, that whole expression becomes true and if not, it becomes false, then that result gets assigned to bool_value after evaluation.